by R. L. King
“Wait…” Jason said. “You’re saying they…just turned to dust at sunrise?”
“So it would appear, wouldn’t it?”
“Did you know they were going to do that?” Verity poked at one of the dwindling piles with a black-painted toenail, almost as if expecting it to reconstitute and come after them again.
Stone shook his head. “No idea.” His heart still pounded hard, and he shivered as the cool morning air met the cold sweat streaking his body. For the first time, he consciously realized he and his friends were barely dressed. “If I’d known, we could have waited them out.”
“Sir?” Aubrey called from the roof. “Could I get a little help down, please, if those creatures are gone?”
“I got it,” Verity said, and used a levitation spell to carefully lower the caretaker to the ground next to them.
Stone focused on his son, who looked more aware. The boy had streaks of blood on his chest and shoulders from where the skeletons’ fingers had clawed at him, but didn’t look seriously injured. “I’m sorry, Ian. I didn’t act fast enough—”
Ian waved him off. “It’s fine. My fault. I slipped when that thing grabbed me, but I got my shield up before I hit. I’m okay.” He still looked pale, though.
“So…what do we do now, sir?” Aubrey asked. He still clutched his rifle like an anchor, his gaze never still as he continued watching for surprise attacks.
Stone considered. “Now…we go back to London and consider our next moves. See if Eddie and Ward have come up with anything from those inscriptions and journals. We take showers and get dressed.” He let his breath out. “And I figure out what to do about our new problem.”
“What new problem?” Verity asked.
“Well…” He indicated the yard. A light rain had begun to fall, further washing away the dust piles that had been the skeletons. “If those truly were the remains of the people imprisoned under the house, they’re gone now. Their dust all pooled together and washed away in the rain. Which means we can’t properly bury them even if we did work out all of their identities.”
“Oh, no…” she breathed, catching on.
“You see the problem. Unless I come up with another idea for how to get rid of the echoes, the only options left on the table are vacate the house permanently, find a bloody good exorcist, or sacrifice myself in atonement.”
24
“You should try to sleep,” Verity said.
“Wouldn’t do any good. I’ve never felt less like sleeping.” Stone stood in front of one of the tall windows at the front of the London house, looking out over the street. It was still early, but a steady stream of traffic drove by in the light morning rain. They’re going to work, he thought with some wonder. They’ve got their briefcases and their cups of coffee, and all they’ve got to worry about is sales reports and unpleasant customers. Not walking skeletons trying to rip them to pieces.
They’d adjourned here shortly after dawn had turned the skeletons to dust. They stopped only long enough to collect the manacles, and for Jason and Verity to run back inside the main house and retrieve their bags, along with clothes for Stone and Ian. Nothing or no one bothered them when they did so; the echoes still apparently still had no issue with anyone not related to Stone. Stone had thought—hoped—that perhaps the skeletons’ destruction would mean the end to the echoes as well, but as soon as he put one foot past the house’s threshold, the aura went red again and the screams began anew.
“I was tempted to go down into the basement and see if those brick alcoves had been broken open,” Verity said when she returned. “I didn’t, though. We can look later.”
“I think those manacles were a fairly good indication,” Stone told her.
They could have left earlier, as soon as they’d all gotten dressed, but Stone had to convince a reluctant Aubrey to leave as well. “Go visit your sister, or your nephew,” he told the caretaker. “I know nothing’s gone after you so far, but I don’t want you alone here with all this madness going on.”
“But sir—” Aubrey had protested.
Stone knew where he was coming from. Aubrey considered the estate as much his home as it was Stone’s, and a large part of his self-image had always been tied up in his ability to look after it, protect it from threats, and contribute to its sense of quiet peace. To be driven away from it, especially when it was in such a state, would be to admit defeat—something the old man was no better at than Stone was.
Still, he insisted. “Aubrey, no argument. I’ve got a lot to be getting on with here, and I don’t want to be worrying about what’s happening to you while I do it. I hope it won’t be for long—we need to get this sorted before those things settle in and decide they like the place.”
“Yes, sir,” he’d said with a loud, long-suffering sigh. “I’ll pack a bag and leave this morning.”
“Give me your word, Aubrey. And ring me when you arrive.”
“I promise, sir.”
Stone didn’t say anything about it, but when he looked at the old man with magical sight, he spotted the obvious signs of relief in his aura. He was loyal, but he was also terrified of the supernatural unknown.
Jason didn’t even complain when they entered the portal. When they stepped through on the other side, all of them breathed relieved sighs. Unless the echoes or any straggling skeletons could navigate the Overworld, they were probably safe here. “Everyone choose a bedroom on the third floor,” Stone told them, “and try to get some sleep. I’ll ring Eddie a little later this morning and we’ll see where we can go from here.”
Verity had drifted back down after her shower, finding Stone where he currently was. “Have you got a plan yet?”
He shook his head, still staring out the window. “Not yet. We need more information. We still haven’t got a bloody idea what stirred up those skeletons. I’ve never seen magic like that before.”
“So the echoes couldn’t have possessed them?” She perched on the edge of a nearby sofa.
“Who knows? It’s possible, of course. But I don’t think it’s likely.”
“Okay…so what do you think is likely? Do you really think whatever was in that chamber did it?”
He began pacing back and forth in front of the window. “I don’t know, Verity. We don’t know what was in there. Hell, we don’t even know if anything was in there.”
“If not, then what broke the door? It sure looked like whatever it was, it broke out from the inside. Or else something or somebody wanted us to think it did. Could the echoes have broken the door?”
He chuckled mirthlessly. “You’ve always been good at asking the right questions. I wish I had some answers for you. I’m hoping Eddie and Ward will turn something up.”
“Why don’t you call them, then? You aren’t doing yourself or anybody any good spinning your wheels. Have you even had anything to eat?”
“Not hungry.”
She came up behind him, taking his shoulders in a gentle grip and turning him around to face her. “Hey…” she said softly. “I know you’re having trouble with this. It’s like your whole world has turned upside-down on you, and I know how much you hate not being able to figure things out. But you’ll get it. We’ll get it. I know we will. You’ve got a good team on your side, but you need to let us support you. Don’t try to take this all on yourself. Okay?”
She always seemed to know the right thing to say without effort, but this time even that wasn’t enough to shake his unease. “I’ll call Eddie,” he said at last. “But…I think right now what I need is a little time to myself. Try to get some sleep, Verity. I appreciate your help—everyone’s help. You know I do. But—”
“I know.” She pulled him into a hug. “I’ll leave you alone. But not for long. I really don’t think it’s good for you to be alone too much right now, and if you were thinking clearly, you’d know it too.”
He leaned against the wall and watched her go. When she reached the sitting room’s doorway he wanted to call her back. He almost di
d. But in the end, he turned back around and continued to gaze morosely out the window into the rainy street.
Eddie and Ward listened with wide-eyed astonishment to Stone’s account of what had occurred the previous night.
“Bloody…’ell,” Eddie breathed when the tale, supplemented with extra details from Verity, Jason, and Ian, was finished. His expression, warring between terror and fascination, was almost comical in its intensity.
“Indeed,” Ward said, calmer as always but still obviously affected by Stone’s story.
They sat at the big table in the dining room, three open boxes of pizza in front of them. Stone didn’t keep much of a staff at the London house since he was rarely in residence, and by the time Eddie and Ward had arrived, both Jason and Ian had insisted on ordering something to eat. It was a little early for pizza, but considering how messed up all their schedules had been over the last couple of days, nobody minded.
“So you’ve got no idea what stirred them up?” Eddie asked, pausing to munch a slice. The bag containing the journals, along with another small stack of books, stood on the other end of the table, away from greasy fingers. “They just…started ’avin’ a go at you for no reason? You didn’t try goin’ down into the chamber, did you?”
“No. We all went straight to bed after you left.” Stone swept his gaze around the table at his friends for confirmation, but all of them shook their heads.
“No way,” Jason said. “You think I’d go down there by myself? I don’t trust those things to keep their word about not messin’ with us.”
“How’s Poppy, by the way?” Stone asked, embarrassed that he’d been so keen on telling his story to his friends that he hadn’t remembered to ask as soon as they arrived.
“She’s fine. A little spooked, naturally, but remember, that kind o’ thing’s what she does. We made sure she got ’ome all right, and by the time we got there she seemed right as rain.” He threw Stone a grin. “But I wouldn’t count on ’avin’ ’er back in for any repeat visits, though.”
Stone had wondered if the medium would be willing to come back and try again with proper precautions in place, but he respected her wishes. “Fair enough.”
“It sounds like we don’t need a medium,” Jason said. “We need an exorcist.”
“That’s definitely an option,” Ward agreed.
“Did you find out anything from those books and your notes?” Stone asked, indicating the stack at the end of the table. “I know you two—you probably didn’t sleep any more than we did last night, did you? You’d have been gagging to bury your noses in them.”
Eddie and Ward exchanged sheepish glances, telling Stone everything he needed to know. “We did,” Eddie admitted. “We went to the library directly after droppin’ Poppy off and got started.” He finished his pizza slice, wiped his hands on a napkin, then held them up and muttered a spell. Satisfied they were clean, he summoned the stack of books and the satchel to him and opened his notebook.
“The journal and the ledger weren’t terribly interesting,” he said, pointing at the pair of tomes. “Well—that’s not true. They were very interesting to us, but not any more ’elpful to our current predicament than they were last night. They were exactly what we expected them to be: an annotated list of all the foundation sacrifices, and a detailed series of ritual diagrams and instructions.”
Ward nodded toward the journal. “Not all the rituals were related to the foundation sacrifice. Many were—the rituals to strengthen the magical and mundane protections on the house were quite complicated, and required several days to cast. The victims were chained in those niches and allowed to die over those several days. Naturally, some succumbed sooner than others, and the constant influx of death energy fueled the workings and provided significant extra power.”
Stone had only eaten a single slice of pizza, and his friend’s words turned it to a hard ball in his stomach. He let his breath out and took a drink. “What about the other rituals?”
Eddie shrugged. “They were nasty, to be sure. ’Uman sacrifices always are. No surprise what they got up to, though—they used most of ’em to gain more power, either temporarily to add punch to something they were tryin’ to do, or more permanently. The others were for strikin’ back at enemies from a distance, either directly or through curses. I ’ate to say they weren’t interestin’, but we didn’t see anything to do with skeletons.” He dropped his volume, glancing around as if expecting someone else to be listening to their conversation. “That’s a whole different kind o’ magic, that is.”
“What kind?” Verity asked.
“Necromancy,” Stone said before either of his friends could respond. Then he shot them a questioning glance. “Right?”
“Got it in one.” Eddie sounded grim. “But I gotta tell you, mate—there’s no credible evidence that necromancy ever existed, let alone that somebody’s gettin’ up to it now.”
“You can’t raise the dead,” Ward added. “It’s simply not possible.”
“What about echoes?” Verity asked. “They can possess things, right? Is there any reason they couldn’t possess their own bodies?”
“No, I suppose not.” Eddie flipped through his notebook, searching for something. “But—”
“But it’s not likely,” Stone finished. “I was thinking about this last night. It’s certainly possible that some of the echoes might have got the idea to try it. But all of them? They’re not a monolithic entity.”
“Unless something else is controlling them,” Ward said.
“Exactly.” Stone slapped the table. “That’s my thought as well.”
“Mine too,” Eddie said. “Because there’s somethin’ else you’re not thinkin’ about.”
“What’s that?”
“Echoes can possess inanimate objects, yes, or even living beings if they’re strong enough to overcome the being’s resistance.”
“Or if it were to allow them in, for whatever reason,” Ward added.
“Yes, exactly. But you’re forgettin’ that when they do, the fundamental nature of the object or being doesn’t change.”
“What’s that mean?” Jason asked. Unlike the others, he was still devouring the pizza.
“What it means,” Ward said, “is that if an echo were to take over, say, a coffee maker, that doesn’t make it any less a coffee maker. The echo could use it to make coffee. It might be able to spray hot coffee on people nearby, or possibly strangle someone with its cord. But it couldn’t suddenly leap across the room and walk out the door. And it would still be as easy to destroy as any other coffee maker.”
“Or Stone’s cat,” Eddie said. “Blimey, I still wish I coulda seen that. But ’e didn’t start carryin’ on conversations in Latin, or takin’ your car out for a spin, did ’e, mate?”
“No,” Stone said. “He…mostly just acted like a normal cat, with a bit of extra intelligence driving. But what are you—”
And then he caught on. “Ah, I see what you’re saying. If the echoes had possessed the skeletons, they’d still be three-hundred-year-old skeletons, and probably in pieces.”
“Exactly right.” Eddie nodded vigorously. “You said these things were strong and hard to hurt, right?”
“Damn hard,” Jason said. “Even when we took ’em down, they got right back up and kept coming. It took a head shot to take ’em down permanently.”
“Or a sunrise,” Ian said.
“Right, right.” Ward spoke with more enthusiasm now. “The sort of ritual necessary to do something like that would require a lot of power.” He looked at Jason. “I don’t know how much Stone’s told you about magic, but it’s quite common for a ritual’s power to wane at sunrise or sunset.”
“So…” Verity said, “you think someone is practicing necromancy?”
“Maybe,” Eddie said. “But I wouldn’t go there yet. I’d sooner look at some kind of strengthening ritual. Think of it less as raising the dead and more as a sort of mass animation spell, with an extra component tossed in
so the bloody things didn’t collapse under their own weight before they could do what they were meant to do.”
“But…” Stone began, speaking slowly, turning his ideas over in his mind before he gave them voice. “That would mean someone would have had to break all of them out of their alcoves. Otherwise, the ritual would’ve had to reach them inside those sealed chambers. That’s some pretty complicated spellwork, there.”
“You got that right,” Eddie agreed.
“What about the stuff from the chamber?” Ian asked. “Did you get anything from that?”
“Yeah,” Verity said. “Do you have any idea who or what was in there? Could they have been strong enough to do that ritual?”
Eddie had been about to reach for another slice of pizza, but let it hover in midair for a few seconds before returning it to the box. “That’s where things get interesting.”
“How so?” Stone asked, leaning forward. “Did you get something?”
“Nothing specific,” Ward said. “We still don’t know who was sealed in that chamber.”
“But you know it’s a who, not a what?” Jason asked.
“We think so,” Eddie said. “And the other thing we know is that it was bloody powerful. Really, really powerful.”
Stone frowned. “How do you know that? And can you be more specific?”
Ward brought his satchel to him and pulled out his own notebook, along with a few of the larger chunks from the carved door. He pushed his plate aside and laid the chunks out in front of him. “Every one of the sigils, symbols, and inscriptions, on both these pieces of the door and the sketches we made, were for a single purpose.”
“Yes?”
“Protection,” Eddie said. All traces of the normal mischievous twinkle in his eyes had departed. “Binding. Warding.”
Stone had never seen his two friends look so serious. “So…you’re saying whatever they locked up in there, they might have been afraid it would get away from them?”
