There came a chorus of “ayes,” and one “I’ll drink to that!” to which the constable said, “Don’t you worry, Peter Croft — you can stay here and drink, while all of us younger men do the real work!” He winked at the man who occupied a table by the window, and was now laughing around the lip of his tankard. He saluted the constable with it and took a long swallow.
“How many will you need, constable?” asked the kid who sat next to him. He sounded hopeful. I went over for a closer look (none of them were able to see me) and guessed that he was nine or ten at most.
“No more than six, William — and I’m sorry, but they’ll need to be old enough to actually reach the bar to get served.” The inn broke out in laughter, and it felt as though the tension was slowly draining out of the room. This constable was a likable dude — if this was D&D, he’d be rolling super high on his charisma scores — and he smiled at the boy, who had blushed deep red when the cop had pointed out that he wasn’t old enough to be drinking.
“I’m in,” said a man sitting at a table next to the bar.
“Me too,” said another.
“And me.” A third from an alcove next to the front door. The constable soon had his six volunteers, and was turning down others who were enthusiastically waving their hands in the air.
“Alright,” he said finally, apparently satisfied with his choices. The six men finished their drinks and slammed the tankards down loudly on top of the wooden tables. “No time like the present. Shall we?”
And just like that, a lynch mob was formed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The constable turned and left the inn, taking his volunteers along with him. When the door closed behind the last man, I stepped through it and followed them out. It was raining harder now, and the street was completely empty. The leader took off with a determined stride, keeping the big stone wall at his left and lifting his boots high out of the shlurping mud with every step. One of his followers got his own boot caught in the mud, his foot coming clear and causing him to lose his balance and fall face-first into the mess. He swore like he was starring in a Tarantino movie, and one of his laughing buddies stuck out a hand and helped him up.
“Keep it together lads,” the constable cautioned, all trace of humor gone now. “It’s not far now, and it’s a serious business we’re about.”
One of the volunteers, a thin man with greasy brown hair, hustled up to walk alongside him. “What’ll we do, constable, if he uses his…” the man dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, and I had to lean in close to hear “…you know, dark magicks?”
“We’ll hit him fast, and we’ll hit him hard. Scaffold’s already standing in the square and waiting for him. His neck will be stretched before noon.”
“There’s to be no trial?” asked the thin man, blinking the rain of his eyes. It was making the dirt run in streaks down his face.
“None needed,” the constable replied firmly. “He’s a warlock, that’s all there is to it. The magistrate agrees. He’s signed a death warrant. Nothing more to be said.”
Seemingly satisfied, the curious volunteer fell back into line behind the cop. We walked for about five minutes to the outskirts of town, past the last house, and then cut off into some dark woods. It wasn’t long before the shape of a shack or hut loomed up out of the gloom, and if I’m honest, I’ve got to admit that I was relieved it wasn’t a gingerbread house. I mean, fairytales happened in woods that looked like this…the hut was actually leaning towards the left, looking as though it could fall down at any moment.
Picking up the pace now, the constable was moving fast but not quite at a run. When he was two steps away from the rickety front door, he pivoted and kicked at it…hard. The door was blasted off its hinges and flew out of sight inside the hut, the cop right behind it. Four of the volunteers followed him in. Two others hung around outside, looking nervous. I felt the same way, but then remembered that nothing could touch me in this place, and that made me pretty much invulnerable, so what was there to be afraid of? Figuring here goes nothing, I pushed forward into the shattered doorway.
Man, this place was a hole. It was basically a one-room shack, with a small fire was burning in the middle of a dirt floor. Smoke was venting up through a hole cut in the roof, which must have let water in whenever it rained…and it looked like rained here (wherever here was) a lot. It wasn’t quite as smoky as the inn had been, though, and there was enough light coming in through the open door for us to see by.
I recognized a bunch of occult symbols scrawled on the wooden walls and ceiling in what I really hoped was red paint and not blood. Then something nasty caught my eye: a pair of what looked like rabbits hung from a hook, halfway-skinned and dripping blood into a wooden bowl on the floor.
Whoever lived here obviously wasn’t much for housekeeping. A wooden plate with some half-eaten…whatever had been tossed in the corner, next to a filthy cooking pot half-full of just-as-filthy water. Even though I couldn’t smell, I almost wanted to gag when I saw the layer of scum floating on top of that cooking water. Gross.
The constable had been looking under the piles of rags and junk that were scattered all around the shack, tossing them aside impatiently when he didn’t find what he was looking for.
“’e’s not ‘ome,” said one of the volunteers. I couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed or relieved.
“We’ll soon see about that,” replied the cop. I was starting to think that I was somewhere in the UK, based on the way these guys spoke; it was kind of gruff though, and didn’t sound modern at all. Not like—
“Falconer!” The constable was bellowing slimy limey’s name over and over again, getting angrier by the minute. He’d looked in pretty much every hiding place inside the hut, and hadn’t found anything more than a few dirty metal coins.
Falconer. That explained it. Somehow I was spirit-traveling to a place that the Snare’s owner had been, or was, or maybe sometime would be…it all got pretty complicated when you were dealing with the spirit world.
“Constable! Out here!” It was one of the two men who’d been reluctant to enter the hut. The constable ducked outside, and I followed him. The fatter of the two guys was standing about twenty feet away from the shack, pointing at something on the ground. When I got closer, I could see that it looked like a freshly-dug grave.
The constable gave a tight smile. “Find shovels.”
After a couple of minutes spent turning the shack upside down and inside out again, the volunteers shrugged and said they couldn’t find anything to dig with.
“Then use your bloody hands!”
The six men hurried to obey, getting down on all fours and scooping out clods of dirt with their hands like puppies digging in a flowerbed. It helped that the soil was damp and soggy from the rain, more sludge than mud, and pretty soon they had excavated down to about three feet.
That’s when I saw the face.
Falconer’s face.
First the nose was free of the dirt (and there was no way I could have mistaken that nose for anybody else’s) and then after two more scoops, the rest of the face was visible. He looked just like he was sleeping, instead of being the kind of asleep that most people were when they were buried in a hole in the ground. He didn’t look dead; his skin was actually pretty lifelike from where I was standing, though it was streaked with mud.
The volunteers were reluctant to keep digging, shrinking back from the body like he was radioactive or something, but after a stern glare from the alpha dog they went back to hesitantly uncovering the body. Falconer was wearing a black robe, just like those that the magic-users are seen wearing in the D&D manuals, though this one was caked in mud and the occasional plant root and twig. His feet were bare, and I couldn’t help but notice that his toenails were super-long, curled up at the end like Aladdin’s slippers. His chest was barely moving, but when I moved closer I could see that he was still breathing,
Got to give the copper his props, he moved fast. He slipped th
e manacles over the still-sleeping man’s wrists, then used a small stone to hammer a metal pin into place on each one.
“Got you now, you bastard,” the constable grunted in satisfaction, straightening up and standing over the body of his prey. “Now you’ll swing for sure.”
I recognized the laughter straight away. I’d heard it before, in the mirror maze at the Snare of Souls. But it wasn’t coming from Falconer, who was still laying in the earth between the cop’s legs; it was coming from somewhere deep inside the woods, which suddenly seemed a heck of a lot more menacing than they had just a few second ago. The laughter was high-pitched and borderline demented.
The Dark Man appeared slowly from between the trees. He didn’t so much walk as glide, and was dressed exactly the same way as when I’d seen him inside the maze. He smiled that same predatory smile as he came forward, and I could have sworn that the soles of his black leather boots weren’t even touching the ground.
“Step back, foul creature,” the constable warned, getting between Falconer’s body and the oncoming threat. “This wretch is lawfully charged and convicted of practicing the dark arts. We have no quarrel with you, but he is coming with us.”
“Oh, I really don’t think so, constable.” The last word was delivered in a way that was obviously meant to mock the lawman. “But I think you may find that you, and your cohort” – he swept both arms out and gestured at the volunteer crew – “might be going with him.”
When the Dark Man moved, he was fast: insanely fast. The skinny brown-haired dude was closest, maybe twenty feet away. The Dark Man was on him in a flash. Wrapping both hands around the back of his victim’s head, the Dark Man leered at him and brought his mouth close to the one that was screaming back at him in terror. I had a hard time believing my eyes when I saw what happened next: even though my gut was telling me that I couldn’t be harmed in this place, wherever it was, I was every bit as frightened as the flesh and blood men when the monstrous creature began to suck the life energy out of his body.
Skinny dude began to spasm and jerk, like a guy I’d once seen having a seizure in Starbucks. The Dark Man was latched onto his face with both hands, pulling the poor guy in closer and closer, until finally their mouths were almost touching in some sick and twisty parody of a kiss. A blinding white light appeared out of nowhere, dancing and writhing in between their two interlocked faces, like some kind of electrical spider’s web. I recognized it as spirit essence, the thing that really makes us us; not the meat puppet that we’re all used to driving around every day, the one that gets sore and tired and eventually just wears out and dies. No, this was the energy that makes up what we truly are, our soul itself.
And it was being stolen.
All of us that were watching stood rooted to the spot in horror, unable to move, even the constable himself who had led us here. The Dark Man’s victim slowly stopped thrashing, going limp in the monster’s arms until he was sagging on lifeless legs, a total dead weight. I know this sounds crazy, but I swear he was actually thinner than he was a few seconds ago, as though more than just the vitality had been drained out of him. He was a hollow shell of a human being, reminding me of those poor concentration camp survivors or end-stage cancer patients.
The Dark Man dropped the lifeless sack of bones into the mud in the exact same way that you would toss the leftovers of your Big Mac Meal into the trash at McDonald’s, and for the very same reason. The skinny dude was a lot skinnier now, and very obviously dead. All the skin of his face and arms was sucked inward over the bones, causing his sightless eyes to bulge out of their sockets. Fat raindrops bounced off them, before running down the sides of his face like tears. The dead guy could only have weighed fifty or sixty pounds at most now that the Dark Man was done with him; he made me look like a muscle-head by comparison.
“Now…who’s next?” the Dark Man asked politely, from behind that sharkish grin.
The five volunteers that were left alive bolted, scattering in every direction. Got to give the cop his due, the man stayed, even though he had to be scared enough to need a new pair of shorts.
“Get you gone, you foul spawn of the devil!” he bellowed, standing his ground over Falconer’s still-sleeping manacled body. “You shall not prevent the justice of the Lord from being carried out this day!”
Color me shocked, but the so-called spawn of the devil just threw back his head and laughed. He laughed so hard, in fact, that if he’d been able to cry, tears would have been streaming down his face. Not deterred in the slightest, the constable reached inside the collar of his shirt and pulled out a small carved wooden crucifix, which hung around his neck on a leather thong. Slipping it over his head, he held it out at arm’s length towards the monster, a protective talisman against his supernatural enemy.
The Dark Man just laughed harder and louder when he caught sight of the cross, holding his sides theatrically as if he was afraid that they would quite literally split apart at the seams. If you watched his eyes carefully though, it was clear that he wasn’t even the slightest bit amused: in fact, I got the feeling he wasn’t even capable of humor, had no idea what the concept even meant. No, this laughter was a tactic, a predatory cruelty like that of a cat playfully torturing a mouse.
“Run, dude! Freaking run already!” I yelled at the constable, as loud as I could manage. He didn’t react, couldn’t hear me at all, in the same way that nobody had been able to see or hear me since I first arrived in the middle of that street. But I had to try…I knew this wasn’t going to end well for the cop if the Dark Man got his hands on him. My mind was firing away on all cylinders, despite the fact that I was quite literally shaking with fear. I still didn’t know just who the hell the Dark Man was. I knew that he and Falconer were connected somehow: when I’d first met him, I was thinking that Falconer and the Dark Man were the same person, but here they were in the same place, at the same time, so that blew away that particular theory.
Or…did it?
What were they both doing here, in what I was guessing was jolly old England from a few hundred years ago? The Dark Man had come creeping out of the woodwork when Falconer’s body was dug up, like a guard dog running to defend his sleeping master against some kind of threat while he was sleeping. Could that be it — was the Dark Man a sort of…I don’t know, supernatural pit bull or something, conjured up by Falconer to protect him when he was most vulnerable?
It made a crazy kind of sense, when you looked at it like that. Even as I stood there, transfixed, watching as the Dark Man slowly advanced towards the constable, gliding smoothly and laughing like a maniac. Yes it was freaking me the hell out, but a tiny part at the back of my brain wouldn’t let go of trying to figure out the link between the two of them. I knew that there were dark powers in the world — Lamiyah had hinted as much, and had taught me a few methods of self-protection from evil spirits and dark entities when I had first started to communicate with her and venture into the spirit realm. Could Mr. Douchebag Abbey be an ordinary guy that had learned how to control those dark powers for his own ends? I thought about it for a second. If that was true, he had to have been alive for a long time, assuming that my spirit body really had journeyed back in time to ye olde worlde Englande, as they used to say: he’d have to be hundreds of years old, at the very least.
“Back! Back!” The constable sounded doubtful now, his faith crumbling with every passing second, and I couldn’t blame the guy in the slightest. The Dark Man was within arm’s reach, and swatted the cross out of his hand with a stinging slap, sending flying off into the undergrowth. Then the Dark Man was on him. Yes, the cop was powerfully built — his biceps were thicker than both of my thighs put together! But it didn’t matter in the end. Though he was stick-thin, the Dark Man possessed super-human strength. When the constable swung a punch at him, the sort of blow that should have taken his head clean off his shoulders, the Dark Man casually grabbed his fist and stopped it cold…and then began to squeeze. Pretty soon the constable was squealing in agon
y. From the crunching and popping sounds, I was betting that every bone in his hand was now broken.
I fought the rising urge to puke. Nobody should ever be in enough pain to have to scream like that: nobody, and least of all a grown man whose days were spent keeping the peace. The Dark Man was laughing in the face of the constable’s agony, craning his neck to bring their faces in close to one another.
Then he began to feed again.
I started to back away, not wanting to watch another good man turned into a shriveled pile of skin and bones; I just couldn’t stomach it. But then I looked down at the shallow grave in the earth where Falconer was still sleeping. Had been sleeping, I saw now, because suddenly his eyes flew open and he looked straight at me, blinking the slick streams of muddy rainwater from his face as he sat up slowly.
“Greetings, Deadseer,” he smiled coldly. “Fancy seeing you here…”
CHAPTER TWENTY
I didn’t know what to say. Hey, would you?
Having dragged the poor constable away from Falconer’s cosy little hidey-hole, the Dark Man was busily eating his face and draining him of his life’s energy. My fists were clenched at my sides, but I knew that it was pointless. I couldn’t touch anything in this world, so there was nothing I could do to try and stop the murder but yell and scream at the monster responsible…and there was no guarantee that I would be seen or heard there, either. Besides, if the Dark Man was aware of my presence, I felt pretty sure that he would just get off on the idea of my helpless rage anyway. So I kept my attention riveted on Falconer.
“Now this is interesting,” the Englishman purred, climbing to his feet and using a sleeve of the tattered robe to wipe the worst of the mud and rainwater from his face. He looked like a homeless Ebeneezer Scrooge, instead of the suave, annoyingly well-dressed Roger Moore lookalike that Mom and I had met at the Snare. Now that he was standing up, I could see that his hair was quite a bit longer — in fact, it was dangerously close to being a mullet, which actually made me feel a tiny bit better…I mean, who’s going to be frightened of anybody who had a mullet?
Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2) Page 14