“What in god’s name is going on here?” her cousin demanded when he came to the pantry and saw what she was doing.
“I am nursing,” she answered, winking at John, and wincing as he did when the cloth reopened a small cut beneath his eye.
John gave the man credit — when Avlock saw his condition he at least had the grace to gasp his shocked astonishment. A moment that lasted only until he realized there were no serious injuries.
“You choose an odd way to visit a neighbor uninvited,” Avlock said in disgust.
“I didn’t choose,” he answered mildly. “I ran into a bit of trouble while I was riding. My horse threw me and decided to head back home. The Karragans have the night off, and this was closer, for me. I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”
Avlock had no time to respond. Edmunds crowded him out of the doorway and was followed by Turnbell and Jeffrey Isle. There was someone else out there, but he couldn’t see past the railroad man’s girth, and as long as Betty insisted on treating him, he decided to let the questions wash over him, answering with grunts and nods until, at last, she deemed him presentable.
He stood slowly. The backs of his legs ached, and his ribs, yet he stubbornly refused to give Avlock the satisfaction of seeing him incapacitated. Not that it mattered; the man was already snorting in disgust at the attention Betty was giving him, and he noted that Jeffrey had left.
“Thanks, “ he whispered as she took his arm and led him into the main kitchen. “I’d best be on my way.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” she said. “If that place of yours is empty, then you’ll stay here until you feel better. Besides, you look as if you could use a decent meal. And,” she added quietly, so the others wouldn’t hear, “I could use a decent explanation.”
He shrugged; she pinched him.
“Betty, this is too much,” Vera complained, looking him over without disguising her distaste. “He’s not even dressed.”
“He fell off a horse, for heaven’s sake, Vera,” she snapped. “He’s lucky he hasn’t broken his skull.”
“Indeed,” said Edmunds. “Then may I suggest a simple meal, a glass of light wine.” He coughed to cover a grin. “In here, of course, Vera. We wouldn’t want to disturb our own dinner.”
Betty’s sister still looked doubtful, but Edmunds took her arm and led her, chatting softly, out of the room. Thornbell left with no expression at all. And when they were alone, Betty brought him to a small round table in the corner by the door where she served him herself, all the while keeping the curious servants at bay.
And when she’d finished she sat, folded her arms over her chest and said, “Well?”
He began to tremble and couldn’t stop it. He was cold. Gripping the edge of the table didn’t help, nor did emptying the wine glass she’d placed before him. He was cold. Clenching his teeth only made his jaw ache, and though he attempted a smile for her sake, he knew his lips were quivering like a child ready to burst into tears.
“In a minute,” he said when she rose anxiously. “Just . . . in a minute.”
Which became five, and ten, before he was able to sit back and close his eyes.
“John, what is it?”
“I’ve found Reskin,” he told her flatly. “He’s dead. And if I’m not mistaken, it’s the same as poor Gert.”
At that moment he sensed someone else enter the room, and he looked to his right, past the wood-counter islands where the meals were prepared, to the door on the other side.
A woman stood there in a frilled and fluffed scarlet dress which seemed too much like blood against the dusky hue of her skin. Her hair was black and long, and hanging straight along her spine; her face so familiar that even had he not seen or heard of her before. he would have recognized her at once.
He stumbled to his feet.
Betty rose as well, and a glance showed him how displeased she was, a displeasure not restricted to a simple interruption.
“John,” she said coolly, “may I present Yasfiera Bey. Her brother you have already met. I believe.”
The woman drifted across the floor as John groped for the table and leaned against it. Her dark red lips were parted in a polite smile, but the black eyes were unmistakably and unrelentingly cold.
“Mr. Vicar,” she said, holding out a hand he was constrained to take. “I am told you have had trouble this evening.”
“Some,” he admitted. “But I’m fine now.”
Her smile widened. “For now, yes. But in my country things change. Sometimes, like the desert, they change rapidly. “
He bowed. “I appreciate your concern. I shall be more careful in the future.”
“You do that,” she said, turning to walk away. “You do that, Mr. Vicar. But be careful of the night.”
Chapter 11
The clock in the hallway struck the tenth hour.
He sat alone in his study, a single brass lamp burning under a green glass shade, a snifter of brandy beside his right hand. The draperies were open to let bars of moonlight fall on the carpet, and the wind that had shredded the clouds at last had fallen to a whisper.
The house was silent.
On the desk blotter was the wooden bowl, and he touched it with a finger, turned it slowly on its base and held up a magnifying glass to enlarge and distort the figures around its middle. A sip of brandy, another turn. A glance up at a book propped open behind the bowl, its pages rumpled from hasty turning, revealing now sketches of ceremonial items from desert tombs opened in the past eight years. The bowl was not one of them. Nor had he been able to find the name of the priest, Sakhtu, in any other book he owned.
be careful of the night
Betty had bridled at the implied threat, but he’d not said a word, passing it off as some sort of proverb, perhaps a blessing to protect him from further harm. She hadn’t believed it; and neither had he, but as soon as he had left, by the back door, he’d sensed a change in the air not attributable to the passing storm — a lessening of tension, a return of true spring.
But he hadn’t forgotten the blackshadow, and once home had called the station to tell them of Reskin’ s body. Planter had been roused at home and came out right away with several of his men, and they’d taken the carriage to the place on the Pike where John had broken free of the woods. With a lantern held high they moved along the path, deeper through the mist, until they found it.
The detective had thrown up; John merely directed the three officers with them to wrap the corpse in burlap and place it on the carriage rack. When Planter was able to speak again, John answered as many questions as he could, silently accepting a rebuke for breaking into the cottage and agreeing to come to the station in the morning to make a statement.
They parted shortly before midnight.
He said nothing of the blackshadow; Planter wouldn’t have believed him.
And he sat in the study till an hour before dawn, staring at the bowl, turning it, touching it, waiting for something to tell him what was going on.
Trying not to remember what Freddy Jones had said about monsters.
be careful of the dark
Trying not to remember the odor he’d smelled when the blackshadow first rose out of the wind-twisted mist.
Waiting in the stone room.
Arms spread, eyes half closed, incense sharp and senses even sharper.
Watching the stairs for the blackshadow to come home.
* * *
Jake Emmett stood impatiently at the door of the workhouse with his hands on his broad hips. His bowler was already in place, a signal that the idiots who had worked late for him today had better be gone or they’d be locked in overnight and good riddance to them, one and all.
He snorted, turned his head, and spat a stream of tobacco juice contemptuously into the worn grass behind him.
Idiots. All the time he was saddled with idiots when all he ever asked for was a few good men to help with the raking and the cutting and the once-in-a-while digging. Of course men like John Vicar
wouldn’t know a goddamned thing about working with their hands, would they, what with all their money and fine clothes and what did they give a damn that he had to stand around every goddamn night waiting for drunken half-wits and idiots to find their damned tools they’d left behind during the day.
Fat lips in a humorless grin, he spat again, took off his new bowler and wiped a sleeve over the crown, slapped it on again and hoped to god the police kept Jones in jail forever. An old woman and a dimwit. No loss. She was always nosing around, and he was always getting lost, always late getting out. It never failed. Just when he was ready to set up with a good long drink and a better long woman, that fool would take the wrong turn and end up screaming for help.
Sometimes, on slow nights, it was funny; tonight, when he’d thought he’d been spared the wait, two of his men had forgotten to cover an open grave back by the Avlock mausoleum. Just his damned luck. He’d been trying to lift the barmaid’s skirts for two months now, and she’d finally agreed to see him in his rooms. Two months after buying her drinks and watching her flirt with the others in the downstairs at the Inn.
And if those fools did him out, he was going to break their goddamn backs.
Like Jones, forever whining about people not belonging, about monsters and ghosts and Jesus Christ knew what else.
“But he can’t do nothing unless I stand over him,” he’d complained only last week to that toffy Vicar, who you had to watch out for because he was so damned chummy with the cops. “For Christ’s sake, sir, if you’ll excuse me, he talks to the damned graves, for Christ’s sake.”
And Vicar had only smiled, patted his shoulder, and suggested that Emmett be a little more patient.
“Patient, my ass,” he muttered, spitting, wiping his chin, and drawing himself up when he saw the men hurrying toward him out of the dark.
“What the goddamned hell kept you?” he bawled, holding his fat hand out for the key. “Don’t you ever watch the damned time, you — ”
And astonishment silenced him when one of them only threw the key at his chest and kept on going, full speed.
Emmett swiveled open-mouthed to watch them dash through the gates and turn right. The stone wall hid them, but the sounds of their running were as clear as the image of the woman he had waiting only ten minutes’ stroll away.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Too startled to chase after them and demand an explanation, he ducked back into the shed, put the key into the safe behind his desk, and turned out the gaslight. Then he shrugged into his coat, settled the collar around his thick neck, and strode to the exit. The heavy gates squealed on their hinges as he pulled them closed, but as he worked the chain-and-lock through them he stopped, and wondered.
The idiots had run away. Jesus God, suppose they’d been snooping around and wrecked something back there, the Avlocks would have his head and his job. He wiped a damp hand over his face slowly, trying to decide if he should just let it be and play dumb if anything was wrong, or if he should take the time to check on it himself.
“The girl ain’t gonna wait all night, Jake,” he told himself.
But if them idiots had busted something, Jake Emmett wouldn’t ever show up because he’d been skinned alive and hanging from some damned flagpole someplace.
“Hell,” he muttered, and opened the gates just wide enough to let him squeeze through. Then he fetched a lantern from the shed, lit it, and rushed off along the paths he knew like the swollen veins on the backs of his hands.
Five minutes, he promised himself; ten tops, and he’d be on his way. She wouldn’t even know he was late; and when he showed up with the gin, she wouldn’t care.
The lantern swung at his side.
His shadow snapped forward and back across the path.
The nightwind rose and chased a leaf to his heels, shook the foliage, took a voice like a crone husking over a cauldron.
He glanced side to side, hating the way the granite and marble glowed in the dark, hating the way the sculptures on some graves took the dark to fill their blind eyes, took the shadows to give themselves movement.
Angels became demons.
Children became creatures with claws instead of hands.
Obelisks became swaying pyramids that leaned toward him and hid the moon.
Then the path straightened, and he was there.
By daylight the mausoleum was forbidding; after sunset it was forbidden. It stood by itself near the back of Memorial Park, just where the wooded hill rose to form the Station’s northern boundary. A high iron fence set it off from the plots of the village’s early dead, and outside the fence a tall screen of evergreens that kept it mostly in cool shadow. It was as large as a summer cottage, white marble and graven columns and a rose window over the entrance that lay triangles and squares of pale color on the white marble floor inside when sunlight managed to break through the thick needled boughs.
At night it glowed, the stone seeming to reflect the cold of the moon, casting its own shadows, growing rather than shrinking when the dark filled the air around it.
Jake sniffed, hesitated, then pulled and pushed at the gate, grunting his satisfaction when the lock didn’t give.
He held the lantern high and tried to see if the fools had somehow managed to break the stained glass window, but it seemed all right, and nothing lay on the path that led to the doors that looked, from here, as if they were shut tight. He scratched his forehead. If it was something inside, he wasn’t going to worry about it. He definitely wasn’t about to go all the way back just to fetch the key. If it was something inside, those idiots would pay for it in the morning.
A quick check around the outside, Jake, he told himself then; a quick check, m’boy, and the rest of the night’s yours, look out, little Mazie, your Jake is coming home.
He chuckled, wiped a hand over his mouth, and pushed his way through the gap between the trees and the fence, keeping the lantern high and sighing his disgust when he saw nothing amiss by the time he’d reached the back. A fool’s errand, and he chewed, spat, and nearly swallowed the tobacco when he saw a shadow standing near the tangle of vines and shrubs that covered the fence.
“Hey!” he said loudly.
The shadow turned toward him.
And his eyes widened when he saw someone else, a man in dark clothes standing inside the fence, near the mausoleum’s blank rear wall.
“Jesus, what the hell are you guys doing here!’
Grave robbers, he realized then; they were going to break into the crypt and carry off what they could.
His eyes narrowed.
The shadow stepped forward; the dark man didn’t move.
“All right, you sons of bitches,” he growled, “you get your asses out of here, now, and I won’t say nothing.”
The shadow moved again.
“Just move on, get yourselves over the wall, and I won’t call the cops, you got me?”
Into a fall of moonlight.
Jake gasped and dropped the lantern.
Only once before had he ever seen anything like it — a coffin dropped by its pallbearers, the lid springing open, the body spilling onto the ground, wrapped in a shroud so tight the dead man’s face had been outlined in the cloth.
But that corpse had been fresh; this one looked a hundred years old.
He fumbled in his pocket for the cash he always carried, backing away, his throat filled with sand, his stomach filled with ice.
The shadow, blackshadow, reached out a hand swathed in grey cloth.
The dark man turned away and walked through the marble wall.
And Jake Emmett screamed as the hand took his throat and lifted him off the ground.
Chapter 12
Midafternoon, and the sky was overcast, the light wind damp, as John stood to one side of the mausoleum gates, hands deep in his pockets, his expression thoughtful as he watched two men in white carry Emmett’s corpse on a stretcher down the path toward the Park exit, James
Gravell walking solemnly behind them, not looking around when John called his name.
He shivered then at the day’s chill and raised his topcoat collar high. He was tired, sand packing his eyes even though he rubbed them every few minutes. He’d been at the station giving his statement when the call came about the caretaker, and it hadn’t been long before the Park was swarming with uniformed police, not a few of whom spent time in the shrubbery, losing their breakfasts and groaning.
John himself had tried to be as dispassionate as he could when he viewed the body, twisted and trampled beneath a young oak, but even now he knew he was still somewhat pale.
He took a deep breath to clean out his lungs, and turned as Cab came toward him.
“Every inch,” the detective said glumly. “I’ve been over every inch of this damned place, and I can’t find a thing.” He looked up hopefully. “You?”
“Not a thing,” John said with regret. “Gravell?” Cab snorted. “He says it’s the same as the others, but hell, John, even I can see that. The question is — why? And who?”
He moved on with a sigh, calling his men to him and leading them away, while John stayed where he was, feeling the marble cold behind him, feeling the sky lowering overhead.
He turned to stare at the mausoleum, lower lip between his teeth.
There was a connection between the murders and the thing he had seen the night before, he knew it, he felt it, and the instinct Ned Stockton had relied on in the past told him it had to do with something in there. Behind those doors. Though he didn’t know why.
The trouble was, Avlock had adamantly refused to permit anyone through the front gates except Cab Planter, and had done so only when the policeman threatened to talk to a judge. No one else had gone in. Planter had been satisfied with whatever he’d seen.
In there, John thought, and stiffened when he sensed someone standing behind him.
“A fortress,” a woman’s voice said.
He nodded, releasing a suddenly held breath. “I suppose you could say that, yes. Our version of the pyramids, I think.”
The Universe of Horror Volume 3: The Long Night of the Grave (Neccon Classic Horror) Page 8
