by E. E. Holmes
“Little book! Little book! LITTLE BOOK!” she shrieked to the night. She raised her hands above her head, clenched them into fists, and then began to pound, with alarming force, on the heavy wooden door.
“Stop her!” Fiona cried out. “Stop her before she hurts herself!”
Finn wrestled Catriona back from the door, deftly catching both fists and pinning them securely behind her back. Catriona fought against him like a feral animal; despite her diminutive frame, Finn grunted with the effort of keeping her restrained.
“She’s not going to stop this until we get in there and see what it is she’s trying to show us,” Finn said. “So, what’s the game plan here?”
“What?” I asked, and my voice shot up an octave in my horror. “Get in there? What do you mean, get in there? It’s like… a giant coffin! You can’t just break into it!”
“Well, we shouldn’t, obviously, but we’re going to anyway,” Finn said through clenched teeth. “Fiona, do the Durupinen put any Castings on these things?”
“I can’t be absolutely sure, but I highly doubt it,” Fiona said. “We don’t give a terrible amount of thought to death beyond the spiritual part. In fact, it’s rare for any of us to be buried anymore. That’s why the graves are in such disrepair and the gates are locked; no one visits it anymore, except for me, to repair an occasional statue. We’re usually cremated and scattered nowadays. Still, let me check, just to be safe.”
Fiona began a slow circling of the mausoleum, closely examining the stones. As she worked, I knelt down and clamped my arms around Catriona’s waist, trying to take just a little bit of the strain off of Finn, who was panting heavily now with the effort of restraining her.
After a minute or two he called through gritted teeth, “You about done there, Fiona?”
“Yes, yes,” she said, coming around the far side of the mausoleum. “I don’t think there are any Castings to contend with. Nothing active, anyway.”
“So, how do we get in then?” I asked.
“We just have to force our way through, don’t we?” Finn said.
Fiona nodded. “There’s a window on the back side, near the roof. If you break it, you should be able to get in that way.”
“Okay, then,” I said, steeling myself against the creeping horror that was rising in me like flood waters. “Let’s get it over with.”
“Should we let go of her?” Finn grunted, as Catriona continued to struggle.
“Why not?” I said. “She’s not going anywhere except into this tomb, so the sooner we open it, the sooner she can stop this.”
“I’ll stay right here with her,” Fiona said, her face set in a determined grimace. “She won’t go anywhere, you can be certain of that.”
Finn released his hold on Catriona, and she immediately flung herself once more at the mausoleum door. Fiona rolled her sleeves up and pulled Catriona into a kind of bear hug, preventing her from injuring herself too badly as she clawed at the stones. I followed Finn around to the back of the mausoleum, where we found a very narrow window shaped like an egg that was set into the wall just below the point of the roof.
“Blimey, that’s small,” Finn said. He turned to me and looked me over appraisingly. “You’re probably the only one who can fit through there,” he said.
I stared at him. “Me?”
“I’ll boost you up, and you squeeze through, if you can. Then go to the door and let us in,” Finn said.
For a moment, my brain refused to comprehend a single word he’d said. Then I blinked, shook my head, and drew a long, shaky breath. “Sure. Pitch black room full of dead people. Sounds fun.”
“Well done,” Finn said. He positioned himself beneath the window and pulled the flashlight from his pocket. With one big, grunting leap he sprang into the air and smashed the glass of the window with the blunt end of the flashlight. We covered our heads with our arms as the shards of glass rained down on us. Finn handed me his flashlight, which I tucked as securely as I could into the back of my pants. Then Finn interlocked his fingers and boosted me up to the window. I pushed my head through the hole and then immediately pulled it out again, gagging.
“Oh God,” I cried. “Oh God, it smells like dead things. And there’s dust. It’s dead body dust, and it’s just hanging in the air!”
“Well, just hold your breath, then, and be quick about it,” Finn said impatiently. “And mind the glass along the edges.”
“Get a move on, you two, Cat’s going mad over here!” Fiona shouted.
I made another involuntary whimpering sound and then hoisted myself through the window, pulling each of my legs after me with a grunt. With a deep breath that I instantly regretted, because it tasted like death, I dropped to the ground inside the chamber. I attempted to pull the flashlight from my waistband with violently shaking hands, and immediately dropped it on the ground.
“Shit. Oh, shit,” I cried.
“What, what is it?” Finn shouted.
“I dropped the damn flashlight and now I have to touch things to find it!” I answered shrilly. I squatted down and began feeling around on the ground in the impenetrable darkness for the flashlight, silently praying that I wouldn’t accidentally touch anything other than bare floor. Luckily, my scrabbling fingers closed around the flashlight within seconds. My eyes filled with tears of relief as I turned it on, still uttering a constant stream of gasps and curses over which I had no control. Large shapes loomed up at me on both sides in the darkness, and I knew they must be coffins, but I did not stop to examine them. The only thing I wanted to see, the only sight that could keep me from passing out, was the way out. I trained the flashlight beam—and my gaze—on the door directly across from me. Fighting back a recurring, heaving urge to vomit, I forced my feet forward, one in front of the other, until I reached the door.
I could hear Finn’s pounding footsteps outside as he ran around to meet me at the door. I reached down and found the latch, an ancient rusted thing that hadn’t even been locked properly—the only thing keeping this door closed was age and decay.
“Fiona, pull Catriona back from the door. I’m going to try to open it now!” I shouted.
I waited until I heard Fiona’s groans of effort as she muscled Catriona away from the door, and then I pressed a palm against the wood, which was cold and slimy. I pushed hard, but it did not budge. I leaned in with my shoulder and heaved my body weight against it. The door gave a loud creak, and a low grinding noise. A narrow crack of moonlight appeared.
“It’s really heavy! You have to help me open it!” I called. My voice sounded hysterical, even to me.
Finn rushed forward, dug his hands into the gap, and began to pull. The ancient hinges shrieked with protest at being forced to move, and did not give easily, even with both of us tugging with all our strength.
Despite my best efforts to control it, my breathing was becoming rapid, shallow, and panicked. “It’s not opening! It’s not going to open! How am I going to get out of here?!” I shouted.
“Jess, it’s moving, I promise!” Finn called. “Take a deep breath and try to remain calm. Listen. Listen to the scraping sound. It’s moving!”
Finn grunted with effort as we forced hundreds of years’ worth of rust to give way. At last we had created a gap large enough for me to squeeze through. I forced myself through the opening with a guttural cry of relief and collapsed to my knees in the grass, where I began to heave and retch.
Finn dropped to the ground beside me and pulled my hair up out of my face, which was shining with cold sweat.
“It’s okay, Jess. You’re okay,” he said, over and over again, until the vomiting subsided.
“I… I’m sorry. I… I don’t know why I went to pieces like that,” I said between gasping sobs. “It… it was just so dark, and there was all this dust, and the dust smelled like dead things and the air… it’s like there’s no air in there, like someone already breathed it all. And there are these coffins everywhere. I just… I felt like I was being crushed. I’ve
never reacted to anything like that before, ever. Do you think it was some kind of Casting?”
I looked up at Finn, who was wiping sweat from his face with filthy hands. He shook his head. “No. I think you just had a good old case of claustrophobia. The proximity of the corpses probably didn’t help.”
Even in the few moments I took to calm myself down, Catriona had pulled free of Fiona and was now shoving her body through the crack of the doorway without any kind of regard for her well-being. Cuts and scrapes were already visible up and down her arms as she forced her body through the opening. I had no doubt the spirit controlling her would break her limbs if it meant reaching its goal. Little though I wanted to, I grabbed the flashlight off the ground where I had dropped it, jumped up, and reached the mausoleum just in time to watch Catriona’s mane of golden hair disappear into the darkness.
“Whoa, whoa, what do you think you’re doing?” Finn asked. “You actually want to go back in there?”
“No, of course I don’t. But this spirit reached out to me, and I’m not going to let a little vomit stop me from finding this book. I think I’ll be okay now that the door is open and I’ll be able to see better.”
Finn was eyeing me skeptically.
“If I can’t handle it, I’ll just come back outside,” I said. “Look, I won’t puke on you, I promise.”
Finn rolled his eyes at me, but didn’t argue any more. With one last, almighty thrust, he wrenched the door right off its hinges; it toppled over and onto the ground in a plume of dust, rust flakes, and displaced snow. The mausoleum interior lay beyond, a yawning black hole, the renewed sight of which made my skin crawl.
Finn gestured as though to say, “After you.” I opened my mouth to tell him that chivalry was officially dead, and that he could bloody well march in there first, but then I remembered that I was the one holding the flashlight. Holding it out in front of me like a weapon, I took a cautious step into the dim interior, then another, then another. The flashlight flickered as though tired from the strain of having to cut through a darkness deepened with the immovable finality of death.
I inched forward along the path the flashlight had created for us. I felt Finn’s breath on my neck and it made me feel calmer, more sure of my steps. I finally found the courage to look around properly at what was inside the chamber.
Stone coffins lined the walls of the mausoleum, but they did not look as I would have expected. The top of each had been carved into the likeness of the corpse it contained, each a perfectly preserved granite effigy of the former owner of the rotting bones beneath it.
“What the hell…” I breathed, approaching the nearest of these with a hammering heart. Beneath the reposing likeness of a long dead woman with a hawkish profile was the name, “Virginia Larkin.”
“It’s like a pyramid in here!” I hissed. “Please tell me it wasn’t a custom to wrap the bodies of Durupinen like mummies, because I might lose it.”
“I don’t think so,” Finn said. “Did you see where Catriona went?”
“She’s got to be in here somewhere,” I said, tearing my gaze from the stone effigy. “Wait, I hear something.”
A dull, thumping, scraping sound was coming from the far corner of the room. We followed the sound, shuffling forward and searching with the flashlight beam until, at last, it fell upon Catriona. She was crouched beside one of the stone coffins, pounding her fists against it and gouging at the edges of the seam that ran all the way around it. Her fingernails were already broken and bleeding with the desperation of her efforts.
“Little book!” she was positively sobbing now. “Little book! Little book! Little book!”
I knelt down beside her and took her face in my hands. “Little book?” I said, tentatively.
She froze in her efforts and her eyes locked onto mine. “Little book,” she answered, nodding solemnly.
“Inside this coffin?” I asked with a convulsive swallow. My mouth had gone completely dry.
“Little book. Inside,” she whispered, and she pointed emphatically at the coffin. Then, her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped against the stone, motionless.
Finn reached past me to press two fingers to Catriona’s neck. “Pulse is quick, but strong,” he said. “I think she’s alright, for the moment, but it will be best to find this book quickly and get her back up to the castle where Mrs. Mistlemoore can keep an eye on her.”
We dragged Catriona away and lay her on her side, to give us room to work, and then returned to examine the coffin she had been so frantically trying to pry apart. The stone likeness on the top of it was of a young woman with high cheekbones and a gentle smile on her lips. Her hands were folded demurely over her white marble chest. The name carved along the edge of the coffin’s lid was “Harriet Larkin.”
The name did not bring the jolt of recognition, the instant clarity I thought it would. I felt no tingle in my fingertips. I turned to Finn. “Do you really think this is right?”
He stared incredulously at me. “Catriona damn near tore her own fingers off to get into it, so it bloody well better be right. Why are you asking me that?”
“I just… I thought the name would ring some sort of Muse bell for me, but it doesn’t. I don’t think this is the spirit that’s possessing her.”
“Look, maybe it’s her and maybe it isn’t, but there’s clearly something here she needs us to find, so let’s open the bloody thing and find out what it is!” Finn cried.
“What’s going on in there?” Fiona called from outside. Her anxious face appeared around the doorway, bathed in pale moonlight. “Have you found anything?”
“Catriona… or rather, the spirit possessing Catriona, wants us to open this coffin,” Finn told her, pointing to it. “Do we have the Council’s permission to do that?”
Fiona rolled her eyes. “The Council’s highest priority is containing this Shattering. I hereby give you my permission to crack the bloody thing open. Now get on with it, it’s fecking freezing out here and the Council is bound to send someone looking for us soon, if they haven’t already.”
“Awesome,” I said, with a slightly hysterical laugh. “Officially adding grave robbing to my resume. Let’s file that under ‘sentences I never thought I’d say.’ So, now what?” I turned to Finn, but he wasn’t paying attention to me. He was wandering the room, scanning the walls and floor.
“What are you looking for?” I asked him.
“Something we can use to pry that cover off. It’s much too heavy to move without proper leverage,” he said and then clapped his hands suddenly together, making me jump. “Ah-ha! This will do nicely.” He pulled a long metal bar from under a pile of ragged, tattered fabric on the floor in the corner, the remains of a velvet privacy curtain. He strode over and held it out to me.
“I’m going to try to lift that cover. As soon as you see a gap, shove this pole in there as quickly as you can, alright?” he said.
“What? Oh. Yeah, okay, I’ll try,” I said.
Finn squatted on the ground beside the coffin and placed his shoulder beneath the lip of the lid. Then he grasped it with both hands and poised himself, ready to lift.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Ready,” I said, my eyes focused unblinkingly on the seam.
With a guttural cry, Finn shoved with all his might against the lid of the coffin, pushing off the ground with his legs, the muscles in his arms trembling with the effort. A narrow gap appeared between the lid and the coffin, barely a couple of inches wide. As soon as I saw it, I thrust the stick forward, wedging it between the slabs of stone with a horrible squealing, grating sound.
Finn collapsed to the ground, panting. “Well done,” he gasped.
“Me? Well done, you!” I said. “I can’t believe you actually lifted that.”
“Won’t mean much of we can’t pry it off,” he said dismissively, standing up and dusting himself off. “We’ve got to push down on it, like a lever, and it should slide off. Help me, will you?”
�
�Of course,” I said. We both placed our hands on the pole, preparing to push. A foul, musty odor was beginning to permeate the room, and my stomach roiled at the thought of what we might be about to see when the lid was removed.
“On three, then,” Finn said through gritted teeth. “One, two, three.”
We shoved downward with all our might, lying nearly flat along the length of the bar as we put every ounce of weight into our efforts. The cover lifted, tipped precariously, and then, with a floor-shaking crash, it toppled off the coffin and landed on the ground in a choking cloud of dust.
As we coughed and spluttered, Fiona’s face appeared around the doorway again. “What in blazes was that?”
“We’re fine. We’ve got it open,” Finn said between coughs.
As the dust finally began to settle, we walked very slowly forward. For all his heroics, I could tell from his very grim expression that Finn did not want to look over the edge of that coffin any more than I did. I took in a deep breath and held it.
I’m not sure exactly what I expected to see; a pile of bones, or something rotted and maggot-eaten, I guess, like out of a horror movie. But the body within the casket, whether by Casting or by a strange combination of natural elements, was almost perfectly preserved beneath its translucent white shroud. The face, which I could only assume belonged to Harriet Larkin, was waxy, and the eyes, still closed, were somewhat sunken, but long black eyelashes still rested on her cheeks, and her lips were still closed demurely over her teeth. She lay just as the figure above her had done, with her hands folded over her chest. Except…
“Little book,” I whispered, my heart pounding.
“What’s that?” Finn asked.
I pointed to Harriet Larkin’s chest. There, tucked between her hands and her dusty ivory silk gown, was a small, black, leather-bound book.
Finn stepped forward, hand outstretched, but I grabbed onto his sleeve.
“What?” he asked.
“We can’t just… I mean, are you going to just… take it?” I asked.
“Jess,” he said impatiently. “We just shattered the window of the mausoleum and broke into her coffin. I think we’ve said ‘sod it’ to any modicum of respect we had here. So, let’s just do what we need to do to end this, shall we?”
