The Bad Box

by Harvey Click

  But Ben wasn’t paying much attention to them. He was holding Sarah tightly in his arms and asking if she was all right, and she was holding him just as tightly and saying yes.

  The men were darting toward each other through the air above their heads, clanging their swords together to make loud bursts of light and then darting away again. Stonebrenner swung his sword at Ed, and he summersaulted out of its path.

  Ben let go of Sarah and tried to aim his gun at Stonebrenner, but it was hard to tell one man from the other. They looked more like bats than birds, hurtling this way and that way, difficult to see in the darkness.

  One of them flew into the north hayloft with the other in pursuit, and for a while Ben couldn’t see them, but he heard the clanging of their swords and short blasts of thunder like gunshots, and then he heard a sharp cry of pain that sounded as if it probably came from Ed.

  “Get out of here,” Ben told Sarah, handing her his car keys. “Get the car and hit the road.”

  “Not unless you’re coming,” she said. She had grabbed the machete and was holding it with the handle against her thigh and the blade pointing out, its tip waving slowly back and forth like the head of a cobra.

  Stonebrenner flew out of the loft with Ed in pursuit, and now they were fighting directly above Ben’s head, lunging and parrying and feinting and slashing while they tumbled and summersaulted through the air. Blood was dripping down, and most of it seemed to be coming from Ed.

  Ed swooped into the south hayloft, and Ben fired two shots at Stonebrenner as he darted to the other loft, but even as he fired them he realized he had missed. Now he had only five rounds left, and he regretted having given a cartridge to the man in the tower.

  “Do you have your gun?” he asked Sarah.

  “No, I lost it.”

  Ed was standing at the edge of the south loft. He raised his sabre high in the air and began chanting words that sounded like nonsense. Suddenly a bolt of lightning shot from the tip of his sword to the peak of the ceiling, and something like a small swirling black hole appeared up there. As the hole grew wider, creatures flew out of it, screeching like insane children on a carnival ride.

  They were dark gray and shaped like little naked men, but they had bat-like wings and grotesque half-human faces with red rat eyes and wide grinning mouths filled with long pointy teeth. They flew around in a confused manner, bumping into one another, until Ed shouted a sharp command, and then they swooped toward the north loft where Stonebrenner was hidden.

  Ben couldn’t see Stonebrenner, but he heard him chanting his own strange words. There was a flash of lightning, and a moment later the creatures flew out of Stonebrenner’s loft and attacked Ed in the opposite loft.

  Ed swung his sword, trying to fend off the winged monsters, while Stonebrenner laughed. “You want to fight with demons, I’ll give you demons,” he said.

  A dozen bolts of lightning exploded from the north loft, and wherever one struck the ceiling or a rafter a swirling black hole appeared. Creatures began to tumble, squirm, and wriggle out of the holes, some of them flying or leaping into Ed’s loft and others falling onto the threshing floor where Ben and Sarah stood.

  Gigantic eels with human faces were flopping on the floor, toad-like creatures the size of large dogs were squatting or hopping, centipedes six feet long were scooting up and down the walls. The barn was filled with strange hoots, cries, screeches, hisses, howls, and yelps.

  “Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Sarah said.

  “I don’t think we can,” Ben said.

  Baboon-like things with red skull faces were guarding the gate to the horse stables, and other misshapen ogres were blocking every other possible exit.

  “I can open hell-holes all night long,” Stonebrenner said. “I learned many things in the box. I spent so much time in hell that I can draw you a map.”

  Something big landed on the floor several feet in front of Ben and Sarah. It slithered around for a few seconds and then pushed itself up from the dirt with two long thin arms. When it was standing upright on two legs it looked like a pale green lizard-man with a long neck hooded like a cobra.

  Ben fired two shots at it, and it backed some distance away but seemed to be unharmed. It stared at him with little round eyes and showed cobra fangs dripping with venom.

  “Don’t waste your ammo,” Sarah said. “I don’t think you can hurt these things. Anyway, they seem to be staying away from us.”

  It was true. The floor was crawling with mammoth centipedes, spiders, vipers, lizards, and grotesque mammals, many of them vaguely humanoid, but around Ben and Sarah a circle of the floor about eight feet in diameter was bare. The air was filled with shrew-faced harpies and bat-winged goblins and giant dragonflies with the pudgy faces of human babies, but they also kept their distance. Some of the things falling from the black holes landed near them on the floor, but they soon walked, squirmed, or scuttled away.

  “Maybe it’s these good-luck charms,” Ben said. “Ed said they’d protect us.”

  Something like a huge grinning octopus fell out of the air right in front of them. Sarah cleaved it in two with her machete, and the two halves crawled away in different directions, one half with five legs and one with three.

  Ben heard Ed yowling with pain or horror, and he floated slowly out of the south loft covered with monstrosities. A snake-thing with three heads was coiled around one of his legs, biting ferociously; a huge scorpion-thing was clinging to his back, jabbing him with its stinger; leech-things were hanging from his face; and a harpy with a hideous female face was riding on his shoulders and clawing his throat with talons.

  The leech-things made slurping sounds as Ed pulled them off his face one by one. He reached back and managed to throw off the scorpion-thing, but the harpy and the snake wouldn’t let go.

  Stonebrenner swooped out of the north loft and jabbed him under the right arm with his sword before Ed could cartwheel out of the way. Then they were at it again, fighting furiously up there, thunder cracking and light flashing as their swords clanged together. One of them suddenly swooped down, and Ben was about to shoot when he saw it was Ed. Then the other darted down and pierced Ed’s thigh with his sword.

  Ed yelped and swept up to the ceiling. As Stonebrenner was flying up after him, Ben aimed and fired three rapid shots. Stonebrenner let out a screech like an owl, flipped over in the air, and began to fall.

  Ben was stepping out of the path of his fall when Sarah ran in front of him and swung her machete like a ball bat. Stonebrenner’s body hit the dirt floor, and a split second later a big hard ball smashed down beside it. It rolled and stopped between Ben’s feet.

  It was Stonebrenner’s head. Ben looked up and saw Sarah standing in front of him. She was holding the machete tightly in both hands, its edge dripping with blood.

  Part Seven: To the World That Waits Above

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Lightning flashed from Ed’s sword and made a spinning black hole appear in the barn floor. He barked out some strange words, and the demonic creatures began to walk, squirm, scuttle, hop, fly, or slither into the hole.

  Something like an enormous praying mantis standing on two legs was reluctant to go. It stood and stared balefully at them with green insect eyes until Ed barked another word, and then it too leaped into the pit.

  Ben peered into the hole. It looked like a bottomless well. A terrible stench like excrement and burning flesh fumed out of it, and he heard cries, screams, whimpers and moans seething with hatred but pitiful in their agony. Even after the hole puckered shut like an anus he could still hear the frenzied howling in his brain.

  Ed’s clothes were shredded. The right leg of his black trousers was soaked with blood where Stonebrenner’s sword had pierced his thigh, his black shirt was soaked beneath the right armpit, and he was bleeding from dozens of smaller wounds. His face was covered with open red sores where the leech-things had been sucking.

  “You’re bleeding badly,” Ben said. “You need t
o get to a hospital.”

  “No, I’ll be fine,” Ed said. “These wounds will heal in a couple of hours. His sword wasn’t tipped with Hermesium.”

  “So you’re one of those?” Ben asked.

  “Yes, I’m one of those.”

  “Who are you really?” Ben asked.

  Ed smiled. “It doesn’t really matter. I’ve been called Charles Newman and many other names. I apologize for the deception, but it was necessary. You see, Stonebrenner cast a very powerful spell to lock me out of his house and grounds. It wasn’t possible for me to come any closer to his property than that little cemetery where I parked. The only way for me to break the spell was to bring a key into his house, where he had built his lock. But you see the problem—how could I do that if I couldn’t enter his house? So it was essential for either you or Sarah to enter his house with my key to melt his lock.”

  “What key? What are you talking about?”

  “The medallions I gave you. They truly are invaluable, and I’d like to have them back now.”

  Ben and Sarah took off their medallions, and Ed slipped them into his pocket.

  “You needn’t worry about Angel anymore,” he said. “She’s buried deep beneath the ground. You’ll remember that, and you’ll remember what happened here, but you won’t remember this conversation. After I leave, you’ll remember Charles Newman as a tall slender stranger with long black hair and a black beard. Let’s make the black beard neatly trimmed—I detest slovenly facial hair.”

  “Ed, this is ridiculous,” Ben said. “Sarah and I are going to remember this conversation and everything that happened here for the rest of our lives.”

  Ed smiled, and Ben heard footsteps approaching behind him. It was the young man with sandy hair, wandering in from the horse stables. Ben aimed his gun at him, but he seemed to offer no threat. Ignoring them, he came up to Stonebrenner’s body, stared at it, and then went back to where the tractor was parked.

  “Who’s that?” Sarah asked.

  Ben started to explain what had happened in the tower, but a moment later the man returned with a large red gas can. He doused Stonebrenner’s head and body, stepped back and set down the can. He pulled a book of matches from his pocket, struck one, and tossed it at the body.

  There was a stink of gasoline and burning flesh, and Ben could see the corpse writhing and shrinking inside the ball of fire. The young man watched Stonebrenner burn for a moment, then picked up his can and strolled out of the barn. Already flames had started consuming the loose hay on the floor, and a long red tongue began to lick its way up to one of the haylofts.

  As Ben and Sarah left the barn, they saw the young man heading toward the house with his red can. They ran to Ben’s car and started backing out to the road.

  “I wonder what happened to Ed,” Ben said. “He told me he was coming to the barn.”

  “Better call and see if he’s okay,” Sarah said.

  Ed picked up on the first ring and said, “Are you all right, Ben? I can see the barn’s on fire.”

  “Sarah and I are fine. Stonebrenner’s dead, and Angel is too. Where are you?”

  “I’m sitting in my car. It’s embarrassing, Ben, but when I was coming to help you a man stepped out of the bushes beside the barn. He was tall and had long black hair and a black beard. I’ve never seen him before.”

  “We saw him too,” Ben said. “His name is Charles Newman—he’s Stonebrenner’s enemy.”

  “Well, here’s the embarrassing part—he told me to go back to my car, and for some reason I found that I had to obey him. I think he’s some sort of sorcerer, just like Stonebrenner.”

  The barn windows were beginning to burst, flames shooting out of them and black pillars of smoke rising to the sky. Ben headed south down the road, since they were going to Lancaster instead of Mount Vernon, but then he stopped in front of the house. It was on fire too.

  “Ed, I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you everything that happened, but right now Sarah and I are dead tired. We’re going to go home and try to get some sleep.”

  “Sleep well,” Ed said. “You’ve earned it.”

  “He’s safe in his car,” Ben said after he hung up.

  “Well, he sure wasn’t much help,” Sarah said.

  “He’s an old man,” Ben said. “He would have just been in the way in the barn.”

  He and Sarah stared at the house. The young man must have doused the downstairs with gasoline and then poured a trail of it up the stairs, because flames were already showing through the second-story windows.

  But it was the tower that Ben was watching. All of its windows were open, and two dark silhouettes were moving up there, dancing like the bride and groom figures on top of a wedding cake. A few flames appeared in the tower and grew bigger, but the couple kept dancing as smoke poured out of the windows. Then their clothing caught fire, but they continued dancing. They turned and whirled and clutched each other tightly, growing brighter as they spun, two dancing sweethearts embraced by flame.

  They looked like the happiest lovers in the world.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  As Sarah drifted to sleep, she was worried that she would have nightmares, but she didn’t. She dreamt that she and Ben were riding horses along a beautiful forest path early in the morning, the grass fragrant with dew.

  Ben rolled over beside her, and she opened her eyes. He was facing her with his eyes open too. The sheet was down by their waists, and the fan was blowing cool air across their naked bodies. Through the window curtain she saw that the sky was beginning to brighten with dawn.

  “Did you sleep?” Ben asked.

  “Yeah. I was dreaming that we were riding horses.”

  Ben smiled. “Our old barn has been very unhappy lately,” he said. “Maybe we should buy a horse to cheer it up.”

  Our, we. They were nice words, and Sarah liked the way they sounded.

  ***

  Charles Newman sat in his study polishing his sword and sipping a glass of old Burgundy that he had been saving for a special occasion, and occasions didn’t get much more special than this.

  When Elden Becker AKA Isaac Stonebrenner fled Boston half a century ago, he had wrapped himself in a veil so seamless that it had taken Newman 11 years to trace him to this town. Newman found him more by detective work than by magic.

  Even after paralyzing him and burying him, Newman wasn’t able to trust him to stay in his box. Becker seemed to grow more powerful in the grave, adding clever nuances to the skills Newman had taught him. He wove his veil around himself so tightly that even though Newman could tap some of his cradled power, he couldn’t overhear what Becker was plotting from his grave.

  Newman’s magic was of little help. The only way he could keep watch over this restless grave was to remain here and resort to the same detective work that had led him here in the first place. So for 40 years he had played the role of the harmless folklore collector, trying to intuit Becker’s schemes in the grave from the spook stories that people told him.

  The stories held plenty of hints and clues, at least in retrospect, but Newman’s age was finally showing, and he had misread all of them until it was too late. By the time he understood Becker’s plan, his enemy was already disinterred and back in his house, gloating from his watchtower while Newman was helpless to get past his lock.

  For many years he had known that Ben Easton would someday be an important ally. The cards and charts and all his other tools of augury had told him that, and so he had carefully cultivated Ben’s friendship over the years and had waited for the time when he would be needed.

  But when the time came, Ben seemed oddly stubborn and reluctant to help, so Newman had found it necessary to nudge him along occasionally like a chess piece. When Ben didn’t take his stories about Longevitals and sorcerers seriously, Newman had found it necessary to draw Darnell’s astral body to Ben’s bedroom in order to persuade him. When Ben was in the cornfield heading back to his car, Newman had found it necessary to make the
corn leaves talk in order to lure him into the house.

  And so Ben had gone where Newman was unable to tread, and he was glad that Ben and his charming young friend had survived. Newman knew nothing of love, but he had developed a kind of affection for them.

  At last he could leave this town, and leaving was long overdue. When he had moved here he had dyed his hair and used other methods to make himself look as young as possible, and over the years he had gradually allowed more age and white hair to show, but now people were beginning to ask him what his secret was.

  There were rumors of a magus buried somewhere in Latvia, and there were the secret alchemist caves of Egypt that he had never explored. So many places to see, but for some reason the prospects didn’t stir his blood as they should. He had been nearly half a century old when he received his Longevity treatment, and nearly five centuries had passed since then. Age was creeping up on him quite noticeably now, and his powers were waning like a once-mighty fire feebly clinging to its embers.

  And he knew that somewhere, perhaps somewhere close by, a much younger and more powerful magus was waiting to pounce, a new enemy who would be stronger and more effective than Elden Becker.

  The Burgundy had been bottled in 1972, the year that Becker was cradled, and Newman had looked forward to drinking it, but the wine was disappointing. It was complex and interesting and probably had been noble in its time, but it had turned a bit sour in the cellar.

  ***

  Stonebrenner’s cradling spell had lost its potency the moment he died, and Angel was able to move again. Already she had torn open her stitched eyelids to stare at the darkness, and already she had torn open her stitched mouth to scream.

  Now that she was no longer paralyzed, she urgently needed air. The stone slab that sealed her tomb was terribly heavy, but by using her feet as well as her arms and using desperation for strength, she finally got it to slide just enough to make a small gap for air.

  She was too exhausted now to move it any farther. But she would regain her strength and she would try again and, no matter how long it took, eventually she would move it far enough to escape the box.