The Year's Best Horror Stories 4

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  "Well, we'll see what comes with the morning," he said, and went to sleep with his back against a tree.

  The ghosts woke him with their moaning as they hastened back to wherever they had come from. Dawn found him banging at the flimsy wooden gate of the castle.

  He who opened the gate was as large, dark, and ugly as the castle itself. With deliberate rudeness, Marvell said in English, "Oh, someone lives here, then!"

  The porter replied in the same language, "If you thought not, why have you been knocking at the gate? Unecht' englischer Schwein!"

  "I speak no Dutch," said Marvell blankly. "What place is this, if you please?"

  "Kassburg. The castle of the Baron Kassier."

  "Ah. Will you tell your master that Sir Geoffrey Marvell craves speech with him."

  "Nein. The baron sleeps now. He sleeps the day through."

  Marvell wrinkled his brow. "S'truth? Well, have you spied a maid wandering through the forest of late? Blue eyes, golden hair, et cetera."

  "One such came knocking lately at the gate, even as you. Come and see." Marvell ambled through the wide-flung gate, followed the porter across an inner courtyard and into the castle's main hall.

  It was a vast room, with walls and arched ceiling of unadorned raw stone, floor of rush-strewn oak plank. The only furniture consisted of a table and four chairs set before the great fireplace. In one of the chairs sat Luise, dwarfed, like a child's doll abandoned in an empty house.

  "She waits," the porter said. "The baron will want to talk with her when he awakes."

  "He has awaked," came a suety voice. Marvell swept off his hat as Baron Kassier closed the door behind him. The baron was less large and only less ugly than his porter, with fat where the other had sinew. He wore a dirty silk bedgown and a blond periwig which flowed down from his massive head to inundate his shoulders. " 'Kann nicht schlafen for this hubbub belowstairs. You are Sir Something Marvell? (My bedchamber lies near to the gate.) What do you wish?"

  "He wants the girl," said the porter.

  Kassier directed his piggish eyes at Luise. "So? You have judgment, Sir Whatever-it-is. And you roam about the forest succoring fair maidens? Very good. But from what, in this case? The girl (I recognize her) comes from Rastdorf, and therefore I am myself her feudal protector. And since, besides, I—or rather Johannes, in character of my deputy—rescued her first . . ."

  "The matter of the maid can be set by for the nonce," said Marvell. "For in truth, Baron, I came here for another reason—that if I do not gratify my curiosity soon, I am like to burst with it. And my curiosity has but one question: to wit, that is't you do all night?"

  The baron looked at Johannes. Johannes looked at the baron. The baron said, "Wie?"

  Marvell smiled ingratiatingly. "You sleep all the day so that you may spend the night as host to the company of specters I spied entering this castle not six hours agone. I would know why. I tell you, sir, I have not seen such a mort of ghosts since last they gave Macbeth, before the playhouses were closed in England."

  Kassier looked at him stolidly, then nodded. "Stimmt. Sit you down, then, while I tell. 'Hannes, etwas zum trinken. In Krueger!" The porter lumbered out. Marvell took a chair at one end of the table, pushing its back against the wall. Kassier sat opposite. Between them, Luise looked from one to the other anxiously. Marvell smiled at her; smiled, impartially, at the baron also.

  "You ask what are the ghosts," rumbled the baron. "They are my trophies—I collect them. That is all and sum."

  "How's this?" Marvell said, sitting up straight. "Collect ghosts! Why, how would a man pursue such a matter?"

  " 'Tis simple."

  Johannes brought beer in pewter tankards. He clanked the heavy containers down on the table, glaring at Marvell as he did so, then took the remaining chair. Marvell ignored him and looked with expectation at the baron.

  Kassier drained his tankard at one gulp, wiped sleeve across lips, and continued, " 'Tis an unescapable rule of occult science that one which hath some great wrong done him, and most specially in manner of dying, must thereafter haunt the author of that wrong, in spirit, until the wrong be repaid. Versteh'?"

  "Oh, aye. 'Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night.' "

  "I talk of no stage-phantoms wrapped in muslin sheets, but of genuine spirits—trailing spirit blood and rotten grave-wrappings," Kassier gloated. "Some, see you, I betrayed into the hands of their enemies, or of robbers, of the state, of the Inquisition. Some I contrived the execution of, on forged evidence. Some I poisoned. But most—ah, scores of them! I created with my hands, breaking and crushing the fleshly tenement till the spirit broke free—oh, what a painful birthing that was!—the spirit tempered in fires of torment and bound forever to me by unbreakable threads of hatred. And like a master puppeteer I play with those very threads. For they come here each night—from Spain, from Sweden, France, Austria, even from Greece and Muscovy, dragged wailing from their rest by lust of revenge. Those I poisoned would poison me in return; those whose beheading I caused would wrench the head from my body; those I tortured would torture me. They come here. But . . . look!"

  He thrust a hand down the table, and Marvell bent to look. On one finger gleamed a ring of gold, crudely fashioned, and set with a flat dull green stone whereon were incised two interlaced triangles.

  " 'Tis one of the sigils of Solomon," rasped Kassier, "by which he commanded the spirits of the air. While I wear it, there is no ghost in hell or out of it can harm me, or any who sit in arm's reach of me. And so we sit here each night, 'Hannes and I—oh, he sits very close to me, 'Hannes does, and follows me where I walk, like a great hound. We sit in this hall and taunt the spirits which flock around, brandishing their weapons and reproaching us with their wounds and crying out for that they cannot lay hands upon us." He laughed the huge laugh Marvell had heard the night before, and clapped his hands around the empty tankard before him. "What think you of this, Sir—er—Knight?"

  Marvell quoted, " 'As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls: Sometimes I go about and poison wells . . .' "

  Kassier blinked ponderously. "So? You deem me a monstrous sham, like Marlowe's Jew of Malta. Nay, rather than a character am I a dramatist, a carver of life into such shapes as please me with their spectacle. And now I have a mind to add your fair maiden to my happy family of dramatis personae." Luise, though not understanding his words, shrank back from the look he gave her. "For the process of—eh—spiritualization here, promises to yield as much pleasure as the later viewing of her, so to say, out of the flesh. Now quote me a line for that!"

  Marvell coiled up his muscles. " '. . . Most foul, strange, and unnatural,' " he said. "But whether 'tis true what you tell me, or a prodigious lie, I think you'll not fright me away, nor have the maid for any kind of your pleasure."

  Kassier's glance slid sideways. " 'Hannes, haben wir ein englischer Geist in unserer Truppe?"

  "Nicht . . . jetzt!" Johannes surged to his feet, dirk in hand. But Marvell was before him, sword-point set to his throat.

  "Luise, renn' hinweg!" he snapped. He caught a movement in the corner of his eye, whirled, but too late. A hurled tankard struck him full on the forehead, and Kassier laughed him down into blackness.

  Jarred back to consciousness, Marvell found himself lying in pain, darkness, and a shallow pool of water. Above, a disk of light held Johannes's ugly face.

  "You are not cunning," a gruff voice echoed down. "We saw, the baron and I, that you understood Deutsch, for you knew the girl, and she clearly spoke no English. No, not cunning, handsome one. But lucky, yes. The baron commanded you dead at once, but I let you stay alive as long as you can, down there. Learn cunning from the serpents, or dine on them. You get nothing else to eat from me. Maybe I come back in a while and tell you how far along we are with the pretty one." He laughed. "After that, I see you soon—with the other ghosts!" A trapdoor slammed into place.

  In the darkness, Marvell crept out of fetid water and grope
d until his hand closed on a hanging chain, the remains of a set of fetters. He must be in one of the castle's old dungeon cells. With the chain's support he pulled himself almost to his knees. Then the wall fastening gave way, dropping him back to the floor, pelted with rotten stone. Splashes rose around him, and hisses. A cold wet coil slid over his wrist. He jumped up and leaned against the wall.

  As his eyes adjusted to the faint light that filtered in from somewhere, he saw that his cell was ancient. The floor was crumbled away and the cavity filled with black water; even the stone of the walls had collapsed in places to a depth of a foot and more. His only companions in despair were a skeleton meekly rotting in the pool and a dozen miscellaneous water snakes.

  Across from him a pile of rubble from the walls formed a shelf which appeared comparatively dry and comfortable. He waded over and occupied it, after dispossessing a number of outraged reptiles, using the chain as a flail. There he sat, and considered ids melancholy situation. He considered it for some hours.

  He came to himself to discover that he had gone to sleep and slid to the floor, nose within an inch of the pool. He retook the shelf and began his thoughts again from the beginning.

  Immured in a tomblike dungeon far beneath the castle's foundations, sans food and sans companionship save for that of the snakes—companionable beasts, for they kept trying to snuggle up to him. Not poisonous, but not pleasant pets either. Sans timepiece, sans weapon save for his dagger, which Johannes had missed. Surrounded by unwholesome damps; and to top it off, there was a draft. The humors of his body were like to become unbalanced. Asthma would supervene if starvation did not—

  "Idiot!" he shouted, leaping to his feet amid hisses of disturbed snakes. A draft must come through an opening. And so, for that matter, must the light and the snakes. He put his nose into the draft and followed it. It led him into the pool and eventually to the pool's far side, to a low mouth hardly as big as a badger hole. Drawing his dagger, he knelt knee-deep in water and pried at the rotten stone. Snakes frolicked around his hands, tangling his fingers. He cursed their playfulness as the stone crumbled bit by bit and debris splashed down. When the hole was large enough, he crawled in and kept burrowing, digging, with his chin barely out of water.

  After more hours, the dagger broke through a thin shell of stone. He followed it, and stood upright in a tunnel whose sides he could touch with outstretched hands. The floor inclined. He turned upward, but immediately came against an old cave-in. Downward, then. As he went on that way, water rose to his knees, to his waist. He shivered with the chill, and wondered if he had incontinently leaped from frying pan to fire. It was the most inappropriate metaphor possible.

  Ghosts kept crowding into the great hall; ghost-light thickened until it was like fog and even the blaze in the fireplace seemed to burn blue. They stood all about the table where sat Kassier, Johannes, and Luise: stood silent but for their omnipresent humming moan, and stared at the baron out of empty sockets lit by sparks of witch-fire.

  The baron caressed Luise's hand. "Look there, my dear. See you that pale lovely maiden with burned feet and ropes all around her? The daughter of an impoverished Castilian hidalgo, whom I denounced to the Inquisition for a witch. She had fed me a love-potion, I told them!" His laugh boomed out hollow through the stone vault. "Look, look closely. See, the merest kiss of the flame yet shows on her lips."

  "I told them best tie her tight," Johannes grumbled. "But no! And near as soon as the fagots were litten, she leaned down and breathed the flame, and so died."

  The baron smiled thickly. "But at the least, her beauty was thus preserved for our present delectation. 'Twould be sad were her face like that of yon Francois de l'Isle, which is as much as to say no face at all. Grilled alive by the Count of Flanders, at my behest." Luise buried her face in her hands and shuddered.

  The rickety skeleton which always led the procession bounded forward into the space before the table and began to caper, like an animated print of the medieval danse macabre. It limped slightly, lacking in its ankle-assembly a few small bones which it tossed up and down in one hand. Suddenly it halted, leaning on the table, and flung the bones down like dice. It pointed a bony finger at them and leered in Kassier's face, a gamester taunting his opponent over the verdict of fortune.

  "The old fellow is lively tonight," growled Johannes.

  " 'Tis the first I ever slew," Kassier boasted. "My elder brother, who had the inheritance. But you'll meet him, and all of them, more intimately—in a week, or perhaps a month. And, talking of additions to our troupe—where, Johannes, is the new Englishman?"

  Johannes shifted in his seat and opened his mouth as if to reply. Then Luise whimpered, staring beyond them, and the two men turned to follow her look.

  Through the inner door glided Geoffrey Marvell, draped to the heels in white, his pale face dabbled with blood. He swayed in the wind and drifted forward, and the other ghosts made way for him with grave courtesy. Behind him a chain dragged, monotonously clanking.

  "Ach, da! Sehr gut!" the baron cried, turning his chair to face the new arrival. "Your English friend, he makes a very fine ghost, does he not?"

  "He looks so natural!" wailed Luise, and began to blubber.

  "Trust a female to say the most foolish thing," muttered Kassier. Then, addressing in English the still-advancing apparition, "Come close, Englaender, so that we may review your fittings. 'Tis no original appearance you furnish forth—bedsheets and chains, Herrgott! But that is the influence, ohne Zweifel, of your sensational English drama."

  Johannes burst out, "But him I put in the old oubliette! He cannot have starved already!"

  "Only observe the blood, 'Hannes. Did you take from him his dagger? No? Clearly, then, he has cut his own throat in despair. A melancholic lot, these English, given to soliloquy and suicide."

  All this while, Marvell steadily advanced. His gaze was fixed on the face of Kassier, with no least glance for Luise, who looked at him with tear-glazed eyes.

  " 'Tis little enough, that blood," Johannes muttered, leaning forward to peer, and thus putting himself between Marvell and the baron.

  "Er hat Wucht!" Johannes screeched suddenly. He hopped up, pawing at his knife-hilt "He has weight! See the way he moves, Baron, and listen—I hear his footsteps!"

  Marvell swooped forward, bare feet slapping the floor. Before Johannes could draw blade, the chain whipped around his neck. Marvell's shoulders heaved. Johannes sprawled silently into the fire. Marvell slid down the table and seized the baron's hand, which had carried an uncorked vial halfway to his mouth.

  The fire was out now, and in the gelid light Kassier's skin looked bloodless, his sag-fleshed face dead but for eyes glittering with fear. Marvell shattered the vial, and green liquid coiled sluggishly on the table. All around, ghosts bayed and thrust out fleshless hands.

  Marvell showed his teeth. He said, "I leave you, sir, in the bosom of your family." He tore the seal-ring and a square inch of skin from its finger. The baron wailed like a dog and scurried under the table. Ghosts, now silent, closed in.

  "Come!" Marvell grabbed Luise's hand and ran for the outer door, brushing away ghosts that clung like cold tenacious cobwebs. They were more material to the baron, as his howls testified.

  Once under shelter of the trees, they slowed to a walk.

  Luise gasped. "Do we have aught to fear, now, from the ghosts?"

  "They're otherwise occupied for the nonce," Marvell said, listening to screams that faded with distance. "But 'twas a near thing, that. I found me in a burrow that went down, far down, before it turned upward again—"

  She squeezed his arm as if to assure herself of its solidity. "Oh, I care not how you escaped, so long as you did."

  "Well, it debouched at last near to the baron's own bedchamber. Which puts into my mind—" He stopped to divest himself of the sheets, made as if to toss them away.

  "Stop!" She snatched them away and bundled them up in her arms. "Real linen, these are. They'll come in handy sometime.
"

  Marvell's teeth flashed in the dimness. "Aye, perhaps sooner than you deem, if we cannot find out that single dry spot again. Come along—" Ceremoniously, he placed the ring of Solomon on her finger. "Whatever happens, there'll be no ghosts to interrupt, this time!"

  SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE by David Drake

  It takes a great deal of skill for a writer to cram a lot of plot into a short space. David Drake does it here in a mere twenty-five hundred words. The result is a strong, scary tale about a soldier back from Vietnam with a war story to tell that isn't quite like any other you've ever heard—and that isn't over yet, either.

  "He was out in the hall just a minute ago, sir," the pinched-faced WAC said, looking up from her typewriter in irritation. "You can't mistake his face."

  Captain Richmond shrugged and walked out of the busy office. Blinking in the dim marble were a dozen confused civilians, bussed in for their pre-induction physicals. No one else was in the hallway. The thick-waisted officer frowned, then thought to open the door of the men's room. "Sergeant Morzek?" he called.

  Glass clinked within one of the closed stalls and deep voice with a catch in it grumbled, "Yeah, be right with you." Richmond thought he smelled gin.

  "You the other ghoul?" the voice questioned as the stall swung open. Any retort Richmond might have made withered when his eyes took in the cadaverous figure in ill-tailored greens. Platoon sergeants's chevrons on the sleeves, and below them a longer row of services stripes than the captain remembered having seen before. God, this walking corpse might have served in World War II! Most of the ribbons ranked above the sergeant's breast pockets were unfamiliar, but Richmond caught the little V for valor winking in the center of a silver star. Even in these medal-happy days in Southeast Asia they didn't toss many of those around.