He sensed he could fall forward and the creeper would respond. It would catch him and lull him, support and caress him; he need fear nothing. With a startled oath, Brown sprang backward. An icy sweat had burst from every pore of his body. The world rocked beneath him and all about. He was—quite terrified. What in God’s name had happened?
“Damnation!” Brown exclaimed.
How absurd—the creeper—the creeper had attached itself to him, to his fingers, hands and arms—a rich swathe had folded itself against his chest, nestling there on his clothing, on the skin of his neck, stuck fast. For it was sticky. Sticky as some ghastly glue—
Struggling, writhing and floundering, he shouted and swore and tore at the encumbrance, trying, exasperated, and next with all his strength, to pull free—how stupid, how silly. He was a fool—but how, how to release himself? The more he pulled and fought, the more it wrapped itself against, onto and around him. Now it had somehow got up into his hair, dislodging his hat, and it had wound about his throat—like an expensive muffler—and the scent, too sweet finally, cloying, sickening—he retched, and chokingly bellowed for help to some nonexistent fellow human, to the sky and to the tower itself, to God. None and nothing replied.
Silence then. A hiatus. Brown had ceased to resist, since resistance seemed futile. Through his mind went a jumble of the words of the inn-host: “To go there—inadvisable. Even to look at it—unlucky.” So no one would come in this direction, and if they must, they would not look. Nor listen and heed, presumably, should they hear anyone calling or crying out for assistance—
In the name of Heaven, what was he to do?
Brown tried to collect himself together. The situation was fantastic, but had to be rectifiable. He was a grown man, not unstrong. True, he could not reach his pocketknife, the only cutting implement he possessed, aside from his teeth and nails—which would inevitably be inadequate. And the creeper had roped him round very securely. But there must be some way! Stay calm, and think.
Thoughts came, but they were no help. He saw himself instead held here for weeks, months, as he slowly died of hunger and thirst, or was poisoned by the stenchful sweetness.
So horrible was this, and so unusually sharply imagined, that for a moment he missed the other, newer sensation.
But then the faint quiver and tensing grew more adamant, and next there was a solid jerk that tipped him off his feet. Tangled in the weedy net he did not, of course, fall. Or rather, he seemed to be falling upward—
For several seconds, Brown did not grasp what was happening. But soon enough reality flooded in. It would have been hard to ignore, indeed, as the ground dropped away, the hillside, too, the forested valley, even the lower pines on the surrounding heights. The old stones rubbed slickly against him as he slid. The sky seemed to open, staring eyeless yet intent at his incongruous plight, while the creeper, muscular as the arms of a giant, dragged him without any effort up the stalk of the ancient tower.
Perhaps he lost consciousness for a minute. That was what had happened. He was only dimly aware of the rough tugging and squeezing that shoveled him in at the thin, hard window-slit. His knees and left shoulder were particularly bruised. But they were minor concerns, given the rest.
Spun up in the golden creeper-mass, coughing and retching still, the spasms uncontrollable if intermittent, Brown lay in a knotted ball on a floor of bitterly cold stone. He was not able really to move, for the slightest motion—even the helpless esophageal spasms—seemed to glue and mesh him more, and so confine him further.
The internal atmosphere was dark, though not lightless. The day poured through at the narrow slot and lit his golden chains heartlessly. Here and there patches of light also smudged the stony inner walls. They formed a room, he supposed, a guard-post, one assumed, centuries before. But now nothing was there, only himself, and the restraining weed.
Inadvertently almost, Brown thrust and rolled and kicked at his binding—or attempted to do so. It was, as earlier, to no avail—in fact, again, it made things somewhat worse.
Brown started to sob, but managed to subdue this. If he lost a grip on himself, he would have nothing left. Nothing at all.
Someone had hauled him up here. That much was evident. They had used the creeper, which must have been treated in some bizarre way and had therefore become both lure and trap. Then they had dragged him in like any hapless fish on a line. Soon enough, no doubt, the villain—or villains—would return and hold him to account, maybe requiring a ransom. Brown groaned aloud, thinking of his two maiden aunts, neither wealthy, or the feckless uncle whom Brown had not seen for more than fourteen years. But maybe there would be some other way. Or he might even escape, when once he was unbound.
Brown desperately longed then for his enemy to come back, to free him at least, if only partially, from the net. Presently he called out, in a stern though deliberately nonangry manner, firstly in English, then in the correct local vernacular.
No answer was proffered. There was no sound at all—aside, naturally, from the occasional brush of the breeze beyond the window-slit, the pulse of a bird’s wings.
Once he thought he heard a hunter’s dog bark two or three times, in the woods below. If only they would come this way—if only he might call again and be heard.
Brown composed himself on the hard, frigid floor, and in his cramped discomfort and bruised pain. He would have to be patient and stoical. Pragmatic.
The spasms had eased. The perfume reek seemed less. Conversely, he sensed the quietly dismal fetor of an enclosed and poorly ventilated place where beasts had died, and too many years stagnated.
He closed his eyes, for the constricted light dazzled, and the contrasting darkness was too full of cobwebs and shadows and shutness—except there, just beyond where his vision, his head being so constrained from movement, could reach—over there, in that wall, something that might be a very low doorway, a sort of arch … or maybe not.
Brown’s watch had stopped—some knock against the window embrasure. But the clock of the day had gone on, and now the evening arrived. The sky outside the tower was turning a soft, delicate mauve, with vague extinguishing tints of red toward what must be the west. It would be very dark soon. It would be night.
Had anyone come in to inspect their catch? He believed not, though somehow it seemed he had fallen either into a stifled doze or else some kind of trance.
The choking and nausea had passed, but he could not now have moved or struggled, even if the web containing him had permitted it. How curious, Brown mused, deep in his haphazardly self-controlled, near anesthetic misery: a web. For was not the creeper very like that: a web? Tempting and beautiful in its own way, but sticky, a snare, and the means to an ultimate capture. And storage.
Should he call out again? If anyone had entered the tower, and was below, they must definitely come up to see to him. There might be threats, or violence, but then, if they wanted him for ransom, at least for a while they would try to keep him in one piece—or so he must hope. If he could talk to them, make promises—however rash or implausible—exhort them to see reason … He was not done for yet! He shouted, as loudly and calmly as he was able. And, after a minute, again.
And—yes. There was at last a faint yet quite distinct movement that he had heard, a little below and behind him. If only he could turn his head. Brown endeavored to, and his neck was spitefully wrenched. He gave out a quickly mastered yelp of physical hurt, protest and frustration.
But the movement, the sound, was being repeated, over and over. Steps, he thought, soft, careful, rather shuffling steps, as of a person elderly, or somewhat infirm, climbing up, toward this room.
Thank God, Brown thought. Thank God.
“Good evening,” said Brown, urbane yet cool, the proper tone, he had judged, in which to greet his lawless captor. The steps had taken a long time to reach him, and once during their progress he had called out again; but now, having spoken, he lay bunched and dumb, tense in every fiber and nerve, awaiting a resp
onse—of any kind.
Because he could not turn and see, Brown was visualizing a myriad versions of the one who had so astonishingly made a prisoner of him. A bandit, or merely a peasant driven into crime, or some eccentric landowner, a savage child—but disabled, certainly, to assess those footfalls; nevertheless obviously dangerous and conceivably lunatic. Brown must proceed very prudently. Yet, even as he speculated on and guessed at all this, he sensed the other behind him, not moving now, needing a pause to recover, maybe, from the climb, although there was no noise of labored breathing or other token of distress.
Perhaps some old wound had discommoded him—nothing recent, something to which he was accustomed. And now he only stood at the entry to the room, gloating. Or … unsure—could it be that? A robber regretting his act, or nervous that his victim, under his shackles, looked far from weak, or himself unable—
“What did you say?” asked Brown. His voice came out far too urgently, and frightened in tone. “I didn’t hear you,” he added firmly, now much too like a schoolmaster, he thought.
But the visitor had made only one small extra sound. Not a word, no, it had not been conversation. A type of whispering, wheezing murmur.
“You’d better,” said Brown, “tell me straight out—”
And this was all he had time to say, before the one who had come in moved suddenly forward and was against, and over, and on him.
Where he had had a glimpse of something gleaming and white high above, when he stood outside and below the tower, he had the impression now of a mask, pale as marble, yet glistening and streaming with an oily moisture that came from nowhere but itself. Nor was it any mask that resembled a human face.
It was long and snouted and somehow blind—and yet—it could see—and there were huge, long, slender needles—that might be teeth—and the large body was stretched out, horizontal, heavy, made of flesh but also hard and pale and gleaming-moist, and stinking, and there—hands—so many dead-white hands, each with just four fingers, and they flashed, flashed, and things tore at Brown, too fast to hurt, and then the hurt came, in long openwork waves, and he screamed and thrashed in the ever-tightening ropes of the golden-yellow web that was like hair, and would not give, or break, but Brown must give and Brown must break, and he gave and broke, and his screaming sank to a dull and mindless whining, and then to nothing at all as the venomous fangs and the thirty-two claws of the creature the witch had raised from the womb on rampion and murder and darkness began to prepare and present and devour its slow and thorough dinner. As already it had done so many, countless times before.
TANITH LEE was born in North London. She did not learn to read—she is dyslectic—until almost age eight, and then only because her father taught her. This opened the world of books to her, and by the following year she was writing stories. She did various jobs, including working as a shop assistant, waitress, librarian, and clerk, before Donald A. Wollheim’s DAW Books issued her novel The Birthgrave in 1975. The imprint went on to publish a further twenty-six of her novels and collections. Since then Lee has written around ninety books and approaching three hundred short stories. Four of her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC, and she also scripted two episodes of the cult TV series Blakes 7. In 1992 she married the writer-artist-photographer John Kaiine, her companion since 1987. They live on the Sussex Weald, near the sea, in a house full of books and plants, with two black and white overlords called cats.
The Hare’s Bride
There was once a woman and her daughter who lived in a pretty garden with cabbages. And a little hare came into it, and during the wintertime ate all the cabbages.
Then says the mother to the daughter, “Go into the garden, and chase the hare away.”
The girl says to the little hare, “Sh-sh, hare, you will be eating all our cabbages.”
Says the hare, “Come, maiden, and seat yourself on my little hare’s tail, and come with me into my little hare’s hut.”
The girl will not do it.
Next day the hare comes again and eats the cabbages. Then says the mother to the daughter, “Go into the garden, and drive the hare away.”
The girl says to the hare, “Sh-sh, little hare, you will be eating all the cabbages.”
The little hare says, “Maiden, seat yourself on my little hare’s tail, and come with me into my little hare’s hut.”
The maiden refuses.
The third day the hare comes again and eats the cabbages. On this the mother says to the daughter, “Go into the garden, and hunt the hare away.”
Says the maiden, “Sh-sh, little hare, you will be eating all our cabbages.”
Says the little hare, “Come, maiden, seat yourself on my little hare’s tail, and come with me into my little hare’s hut.”
The girl seats herself on the little hare’s tail, and then the hare takes her far away to his little hut, and says, “Now cook green cabbage and millet-seed, and I will invite the wedding-guests.”
Then all the wedding-guests assembled.
Who were the wedding-guests? That I can tell you as another told it to me. They were all hares, and the crow was there as parson to marry the bride and bridegroom, and the fox as clerk, and the altar was under the rainbow.
The girl, however, was sad, for she was all alone.
The little hare comes and says, “Open the doors! Open the doors! The wedding-guests are merry!”
The bride says nothing, but weeps.
The little hare goes away.
The little hare comes back and says, “Take off the lid! Take off the lid! The wedding-guests are hungry!”
The bride again says nothing, and weeps.
The little hare goes away.
The little hare comes back and says, “Take off the lid! Take off the lid! The wedding-guests are waiting!”
Then the bride says nothing, and the hare goes away. But she dresses a straw-doll in her clothes, and gives her a spoon to stir with, and sets her by the pan with the millet-seed, and goes back to her mother.
The little hare comes once more and says, “Take off the lid! Take off the lid!” and gets up, and strikes the doll on the head so that her cap falls off.
Then the little hare sees that it is not his bride, and goes away and is sorrowful.
Crossing the Line
GARTH NIX
It wasn’t much of a posse, only six men, all of them old and tired, and Sheriff Bucon himself was pushing sixty and hadn’t ridden more than two miles for years. There wouldn’t have been a posse at all if it wasn’t for Rose Jackson literally dragging the men out of the hotel by shirt collar or waistcoat button, dragging them right out of their comfortable Thursday afternoon poker game and shouting and shaming them onto horses, repeating a similar process that had been enacted on Bucon a half hour before, when Rose had winkled him out of the town’s one and only jail cell, where he’d been shutting his eyes for just a moment since earlier that morning.
It was always hard to resist Rose Jackson on the path of her own righteousness, and never more so that day, when she had good reason for it. Her one and only daughter, Laramay, kidnapped by a chancer, a drifter, a man with a strange round-shaped head and eyes two different colors that no one who saw him could agree on, some saying brown and blue, others green and black. He’d ridden in from the east, which was good, and paid for his dinner, whiskey and room with a gold half eagle, which was even better. Said his name was Alhambra, Jayden to his friends, and he was intending to buy property, and would take a look at the two ranches that were always for sale those days, the Double-Double-U and the Star-Circle, the first being for sale on account of its miserableness and general lack of suitability to raise anything but dust, and the second because Broad Bill Jackson had died four years before and his widow, Rose, wanted to take their daughter back east to the big city, to see some doctor on account of Laramay being kind of simple, or maybe because she might catch a better grade of husband, what with her getting close to marrying age and prettier by the month; even if sh
e was shorter and squarer across the shoulders than most considered beautiful, she had a gift of music that made anyone within earshot reconsider her charms.
When Alhambra came to look at the Star-Circle, he didn’t do any buying. He saw Laramay singing as she put the sheets through the wringer, singing and turning the big cast-iron wheel, with the soapy water all up her bare arms and the birds themselves coming down to listen, sitting on the line with Laramay’s and her mother’s clean, wet nightdresses flapping in the wind, and Alhambra just rode on in, picked the girl up in one strong sweep and flung her across his saddlebow, like is often described in tales but is damned hard to do, with many an abduction coming apart with the giving of a girth strap, or a sudden pang to the shoulder. Neither of which occurred this time, and Alhambra was off back up the road with Laramay and almost out of sight before Rose come busting out of the kitchen with her Sharps .50-70 carbine, which she was a dead shot with if the target was close enough and not too risky, neither being the case with Alhambra so distant already and the girl like to be hit as well, or the horse, and her likely to be sore hurt in the fall.
So Alhambra got away, with Rose losing maybe an hour to round up the posse, such as it was, so that the trail was not white-hot, nor even red-hot, but more like that last snowy ash that nevertheless can burn you more than expected, and was certainly warm enough for even old Bucon to follow, who had the experience even if his eyes weren’t too good, necessitating a few stops to climb off his horse, get down on hands and knees and inspect the faint, partial crescent mark of a shod horse in the hard dirt, or the angle of a break in the stem of a trampled shrub, and then slowly hoist himself up again, point and declaim, “Thataway,” usually followed a few seconds later by “I reckon.”
It didn’t take more than three hours of pursuit for Bucon at least, and maybe a couple of the others, not including Rose, to figure that Alhambra wasn’t heading for anywhere at all usual, not back to the main road, such as it was, or the mule track over the mountain, or down into Bottle Canyon that opened up into lots of lesser canyons, gorges, ravines and reentrants and was the destination of choice for the local cattle-rustlers and petty thieves.
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