by Jack Ketchum
DODGSON
They scrambled up through the narrow streets of the ancient city.
Dodgson was watching Jordan Chase. He didn’t like what he saw. All of them were breathing hard and sweating but Chase was moving like an old man now and even in the dark Dodgson could see his pallor. When they glanced at each other there was a feverish light in his eyes that made him wonder how firm a hold Chase had on his sanity. He knew that look. He’d seen it only minutes and years before. On Margot.
Still it was Chase who led them. He seemed somehow to know the place-so that when he stepped over the guardrail and into the ruin they followed him and found themselves standing on a mosaic floor. Dodgson lit a match. He saw a bright god riding a panther. The panther clawed the air and snarled.
“Apollo?” said Danny.
“Dionysos,” Chase said, “another fertility deity only male this time. Blood sacrifice. The Mysteries. Wine. The last of the gods worshipped here. We’re in the House of Masks. Let’s rest.”
His voice was listless, dull, a recitation.
It seemed as good a place as any, though. There was one narrow doorway but other than that it was closed off on all sides, open only to the sky. The walls were high.
He hefted a rock. Perhaps it had been a piece of the building once. He felt a bit ridiculous. David and Goliath, he thought. Who are you kidding? But at least the rock was something. It imparted weight, substance, solidity. The illusion of security. He saw without surprise that, aside from Chase, the others held them too. When had they picked them up? He hadn’t noticed.
He leaned against the wall facing the doorway and sat down into a crouch. Billie slid next to him, leaned over and kissed him.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too.”
Dodgson smiled. They had whispered but sound carried here. He didn’t care. He didn’t give a damn who heard him.
DUET
Lelia heard him.
From atop the mountain her fury boiled down like lava.
Chase didn’t.
Leaning back against the wall he felt the blast of anger but had no idea as to its cause. It didn’t matter. He knew where it came from.
It had been some time since the others had been wholly in the world for him. They came and went like shadows on a cloudy day. He was aware of their proximity. They were bodies that moved along beside him. Familiar but somehow distant. He realized a certain responsibility to lead them. Occasionally to speak.
But his focus was with her, had been throughout the climb. He felt her intensely now. He was amazed at how strong she’d become. He knew she was very much at home here.
She seemed to fill him completely.
He sensed other things, other voices, vague, undefined and insubstantial. Things with hooks and claws. Things that commanded, that blinded in a sudden white-hot glare. He knew they were important too but he could not hold them yet-he was too much with her.
He watched and listed. Filled, straining.
***
While she burned down at them.
While those she controlled crept down the mountain.
You will die here.
Her voice broke over him.
It was all too real, too powerful. Not a prediction but a curse. He felt a wave of nausea.
He tried to block it out, to concentrate on what was actually there, on the people around him, on the small colored tiles beneath his feet. Dionysos riding a panther. Even on his heartbeat and the sound of his breathing.
All of you. I will suck you dry.
The tiles, he thought. Look at them. Something in them sounds the other voices.
Dionyos. Apollo. Brother. Consort. All linked? All the same?
Show me.
He listened for them and dimly, they were there. And they were frightening too, unknown and immense as she was, but more familiar, safer somehow-a kind of haven from some other time, another place. A rightness about them. A circle closing.
Louder now, commanding.
I will claw my name in your flesh.
He struggled with a flurry of images, to hold them and let them come. A dark, dark room. Night. Stone.
Screeching.
Kneeling.
Mykene and the crypt…
…and something hot and burning, hot enough to lay back the flesh of his eyelids in scorched black cinders.
What?
I am very close to dying now, he thought. Very close. Let me see this first.
He reached. Fell short. Reached again-his breath coming in gasps, his body bathed in sweat.
He pulled at it, wrested it from the dark of the moon.
The earth went black and distant. The voices inside him were everything-all there could ever be-her voice and the other and somewhere his own, screaming, crying for help and for a strength he could never, he thought, attain in any world under the sun.
Her vengeance moved down the mountain.
BILLIE
“Chase! Jesus, Chase, wake up!”
Dodgson was shaking him, slapping him.
One scream and then utter silence. What did he see?
Slapping him wasn’t going to help any.
“Stop it,” she said.
Dodgson moved out of her way. She put her hand to his mouth and nose. He was barely breathing. His face had gone dead white, his eyes rolled in their sockets. The jaw muscles were clenched tight.
“Pry his mouth open,” she told Dodgson. She turned to Danny and Michelle. “Get a stick. A strong one.”
Dodgson had his mouth open and she felt for his tongue. It was curled toward the back of his mouth. She rolled it forward.
Danny tapped her on the shoulder and handed her a stick. She positioned it along the front teeth and back along the left line of molars.
“You can let go now,” she told Dodgson.
The jaws clamped shut.
She felt his pulse. It was weak but regular. His wrist was chilled and damp.
“We ought to have water,” she said.
“I saw a jar back there,” said Michelle. “What do you call it? An amphora. There ought to be rainwater inside.”
“I just need something to wet him down with. Use Danny’s shirt.”
“Danny, go with her, okay?” said Dodgson. “Nobody wanders off alone.”
“Right.”
They moved toward the doorway.
“Hey guys?” said Dodgson.
They stopped and turned.
“Careful.”
Danny smiled. “You got it, Skip.”
They waited. The air was still. The footsteps faded. Dodgson slipped his arm around her waist.
She stroked Chase’s face and ran her fingers through his thin straight hair, trying to bring him back to sensation. His breathing had a hollow sound to it, a subtle rattling. She’d check his tongue again in a minute.
Something moved in the brush.
They jumped. A lizard scuttled across the tiles.
“Shit!” said Dodgson.
Danny and Michelle came back through the open doorway. Danny had his shirt off and held it out to her. It was dripping wet.
“Thanks.”
She moistened his lips, then began to mop his brow. She had done this so often for her mother. The rattling sound had disappeared from his breathing. That meant his tongue was back in place again. She opened his shirtsleeves and ran the wet cloth over his arms and forearms, rolled down his socks and swabbed his ankles.
Danny bent over her, watching.
“What the hell happened?”
“No idea.”
She ran the cloth over his face again, then opened his shirt and ran it around his neck. His muscles were very tense. He was taking an immense beating, an immense amount of strain. She watched the jaw muscles spasm. She wondered how old he was. She hoped his heart was in reasonably good shape. Right now it had better be.
Come on, she thought. We need you.
She thought she felt him relax a little. But he still had no col
or and his breathing was still shallow.
They heard dogs howling. Far away.
She looked at Dodgson. “You remember what he said?”
“I remember. Dogs announce her coming. I remember every word of it.”
She removed the wet shirt. That’s odd, she thought. She felt his forehead.
“Feel that,” she said.
Dodgson put his hand to his forehead. Michelle touched his cheek. “My god,” said Dodgson.
“Fever,” she said.
“He’s burning up. When did this begin?”
“Just now.” She touched him again. “And I may be crazy,” she said, “but it seems to me it’s climbing. Climbing fast.”
“Jesus,” said Danny. “If this guy dies on us…”
“I know.”
“What’ll we do?”
“There’s nothing we can do. Only what I’m doing. And hope it breaks.”
“So we’re stuck here?”
“I’m afraid so. We don’t dare move him.”
“Hell, I don’t know where we’d go anyway,” said Dodgson. “He’s the one who’d know.”
Michelle moved into Danny’s arms. He hugged her tight.
Billie glanced at Dodgson. He was watching them, smiling a little. Feeling, probably, exactly what she was feeling-that it was good they had one another. That, at least.
Chase had nobody.
She touched his forehead.
The fever mounted.
JORDAN THAYER CHASE
He lay in a pit of fire and molten rock. The flesh of his hands, arms and legs melted, peeled back over sizzling, dripping fat and scorched muscle. He tried to rise. His mouth fell open in a howl of agony. Blisters filled and popped along his back, his loins, his chest. His lips and eyes burst. The muscles of his legs seared through and snapped. He fell into the pit, splashing liquid fire.
He lay quiet. It would last as long as it had to last.
He remembered Tasos’ words.
He drank from the cup.
LELIA
She felt something stir below, sealed off from her, a blinding flame.
She felt no fear of him.
It was right that this should be so.
Still she prepared. She drew together all she had captured from the sleeping earth-the pull of the moon, full in the springtime sky, the cruel mystery of its dark phase, studded with walking shadows.
She drew up the beasts, which were hers. And the dead, which were hers also.
She embraced them, drank their blood.
They stood bathed in hers.
LEGIONS
They heard a shuffling-like someone walking through thick mud- along the path, where there was no mud.
They heard rustling in the brush just beyond the entrance to the ruin.
Suddenly the illusion of security was gone, the illusion of hiding from her was gone.
They stood together and waited.
Dodgson felt resigned to it. Sooner or later they were going to have to face one another. He thought of the first time he’d seen her, languid and beautiful in the sun. He thought there had never been any sense to it at all.
He clutched the stone in his hand and watched the entranceway.
The rustling stopped.
Slogging sounds moved closer up the path.
And perhaps there was a moment then when they might have bolted out through the doorway and prolonged the inevitable. But nobody moved. Then Billie looked up over their heads to the top of the wall- some bright clear instinct made her look-and they heard her gasp. Dodgson felt her jerk away from him.
Her fear ran through them like an open wire.
They circled the top of the wall on all four sides, crouched like miniature gargoyles from another age altogether, eyes luminous, watching.
Dozens of them.
They saw the still, patient hunger. Noses twitching to the scent of fear, to the quick blood pumping.
Danny raised a rock.
“Don’t," Dodgson whispered.
It would assure the cats’ attack. The first aggressive move, the first sign of panic. For a moment they hung suspended there.
Danny lowered the rock. His eyes looked drunk, haunted.
Billie felt Dodgson’s hand on her arm, pulling her gently, firmly away from where Jordan Chase was lying, pulling her slowly toward the doorway. She was quivering. She felt choked, breathless.
Her nightmare opened out in front of her like the petals of some dark flower.
She knows me, she thought. Knows me well.
They backed toward the entrance.
The eyes watched. Depthless, calm, intent.
It was dreamlike and slow, as though the very air had thickened, like backing through mercury.
The slogging sounds behind them continued. Closer.
Chase moaned.
Not now, thought Dodgson. Don’t wake. There’s nothing we can do. They moved across the mosaic of the god who rode the panther, away from him.
He felt Chase pull at him.
Dodgson felt tied to all of them now by tough invisible strings, a chain of flesh-he felt Danny’s strength and bulk beside him and Michelle’s fast whiplike frame next to Danny’s and most of all Billie’s soft flesh in his hand, flesh these claws could tear so easily and that had already known a tearing. He seemed to feel it tighten, coarsen, as though to protect itself.
He could almost feel the blood pulse beneath the skin.
I’m sorry, Chase, he thought. Lie still.
The entrance was only ten or twelve feet away.
He watched the watchers, eyes glowing against a field of stars, blazing through the moonless night.
Then Billie began to unravel.
He felt it before he heard it, a whimpering sound welling up out of her like some black twisted thing she’d tried and failed to hold inside. Sounds like some small animal caught in the razor teeth of a trap.
He felt a dark flash of anger.
Lelia, you fucking coward. Get these away. Show yourself. To me.
The eyes watched them.
He smelled fear-sweat and something else, something he couldn’t identify. Something sweet and cloying that bruised the clean night air.
Billie could barely move now. Barely see through a film of tears.
“Please,” she said. Not knowing she would say it. Not knowing she would utter a sound until it had escaped her-and then it was irrevocable.
***
It was like a signal.
Something moved atop the wall.
It slid down-a hiss of silken movement.
Strings snapped.
Dodgson felt them snap. He heard someone cry out.
The cats poured off the wall.
They ran and at first there was a strange disorientation, adrenalin making him light-headed and dizzy as though he’d been in a car crash and they’d turned the car over and come up not knowing who was where, hanging there in some upside-down limbo while figures scurried out around him. Then he saw the doorway and knew his target. He heard yowling, snarling behind him, padded feet hitting the tiled mosaic like huge drops of rain.
He ran toward the entrance, Billie at his side just behind him. Somehow Michelle had gotten there ahead of him and Danny…
…where was Danny?
Billie screamed. It cracked over him like a whip. He whirled.
The cat clung to her shoulders, wild-eyed, ears pulled low, mouth open wide and hissing. And there was Danny, there behind her, reaching for it, cursing. He saw him pull it off her, heard the shirt rip and saw blood fly as its claws pulled free and he tossed it back over his head against the wall. He heard it screech in pain.
…and then they were close, too close. He saw Danny turn.
Suddenly there were cats all over him.
Bodies tearing with teeth and claws, tight, muscular and dug-in deep as leeches in just that slim fraction of a second. Dodgson pushed Billie through the doorway. He could hear them ripping, tearing, while Danny struggled under the w
eight and mass of them. Dodgson turned back for him. He heard himself screaming and some sound from Danny that he could not describe and would never forget.
He saw Danny pound and kick while those that were not already on him circled, spitting, then leapt to find some open space on him, some space that was not already covered and bleeding, saw him fall back into a sea of writhing bodies that leapt off and back again as he fought. Dodgson moved forward, kicking, felt a grim delight as he heard one scream and felt its ribs crack, kicked another in the head and saw it fall away.
They were on Danny’s arms and legs and up on his shoulders. Dodgson saw his knees buckle and saw him sink to the tiled floor as they swarmed, digging in with their forepaws and kicking with their strong back legs, tearing at him.
He kicked another one square in the face and saw blood and spittle fly.
And then they discovered him too.
One launched itself at his head. He jerked away reflexively. A thin mangy tabby leapt onto his thigh, biting, claws sunk deep. He screamed and battered at it with the rock, broke its neck, flung it off. He felt Billie's hands on him, pulling him back, her fingers suddenly as strong as talons.
He looked at Danny.
You could barely see him now.
He saw one bloody hand reach for the big black cat at his chest, grab it by the neck and pull. But he hadn't the strength to dislodge it. The arm thrashed uselessly. There were three at his neck, forepaws working, searching out the vein. His face was covered. Dodgson saw them biting.
Billie pulled.
For some reason the cats ignored Dodgson now. Some stared at him. Others at something behind him.
He saw Michelle at his side, hands to her mouth, her eyes thin slits of loss and pain.
It was suicide to try to help him.
He spun Michelle into his arms. She didn’t need to see any more of this. She hung there heavily, her body seeming to jump convulsively. He heard sobbing, terrible sounds.
He saw Billie gasp, her eyes go suddenly wide.
He looked at Danny.
They had found the jugular. Blood burst over the feeding bodies.
He grabbed Billie too and they stumbled out the doorway…