Balefires

by David Drake

  ***

  Cashel stayed like that for-well, for a time. He figured he could move if he had to, but since he didn't he was just going to rest till he felt like doing something else.

  Though he'd kept his eyes open, he didn't have much awareness of his surroundings. There wasn't a lot to see, after all; just the trail of coarse grit that'd been a statue there on the floor in front of him. It looked like what he'd seen on the hills he'd climbed to reach the tower…

  "Are you ready to go home, Cashel?" Mona said.

  Cashel's world clicked back into hard focus again. He turned his head and smiled at the girl, feeling a little embarrassed. How long had she been standing there, waiting for him to come to himself?

  "I'm all right," he said, wondering how true that was. He stood, lifting himself partly by the strength of his arms on the quarterstaff. He swayed a little, but no worse than you always did when you'd been bent over and got up suddenly.

  He grinned wider and said, "I'm fine," meaning it this time. "But how do we get back home, Mona?"

  As Cashel spoke, he took a closer look at the walls. His eyes narrowed."Mona?" he said. "Things don't look right. The stone looks thin. It wasn't like that before."

  "This world is decaying," the girl said, "and not before time. We have to get you out of here, though. Come."

  She stepped through the doorway to the room where the statue had waited; the gold key was out in her hand again. Cashel followed, as he'd been doing ever since he met the girl-except when there was the fighting.

  He grinned again. That was all right. Mona was better at leading than Cashel ever wanted to be, and she'd kept out of the way when he went to work.

  Mona looked back at him. "I'm sorry I had to trick you," she said. "Your help was very important."

  Cashel shrugged. "You didn't have to trick me, Mona," he said. "You could just have asked. But that's all right."

  The throne had fallen into a pile of sand and pebbles like the thing that'd sat on it. On the wall behind was another door. Mona stuck the key into the door-there hadn't been a keyhole that Cashel could see, but he was sure about what she'd just done-and pulled the panel open.

  "Go on through, Cashel," she said, smiling like the sun rising. "Thank you. We all thank you."

  Cashel hesitated. "You're coming too, aren't you, Mona?" he said. Light and color without shape swirled in the door opening.

  Her smile became pensive. She raised the key in the hand that didn't hold the door open. "I have to free the seeds we found," she said. "Otherwise they'll rot instead of growing as they should."

  "But what happens to you?" Cashel said.

  "Go on back to your own world, Cashel," Mona said, her voice hard without harshness. "There must be renewal."

  Cashel cleared his throat. He didn't have anything to say, though, so he nodded and walked toward the opening. As his leading foot entered the blur of color, Mona said, "Your house will always be a happy one, dear friend."

  For a moment Cashel stepped through nothingness so silent that he heard his heart beating; then his boot heel clacked on stone. He was standing in the familiar hallway down which he'd been going to dinner.

  "Oh!" cried a servant, dropping the pair of silver ewers he'd been carrying to refill from the well in the courtyard at the end of the passage. They rang on the floor, sounding sweet or hollow by turns as they rolled.

  Cashel squatted, holding his staff upright in one hand as he caught the nearer pitcher. It might have a few new dings in it, but he didn't guess the servant would get in real trouble.

  "Oh, your lordship, I'm so sorry!" the fellow babbled. He took the ewer from Cashel's hand but he was trembling so bad he looked like he might drop it again. "I didn't see you!"

  Cashel glanced at the door he'd come out of… and found there wasn't one, just a blank wall between the entrances to a pair of large suites. He stood up. "Sorry," he said apologetically. "I didn't mean to startle you."

  Cashel headed on in the direction he'd been going when he'd first heard the girl-well, first heard Mona-crying. He'd never really liked this palace. It was a dingy place, badly run-down before Garric arrived and replaced the Count of Haft with a vicar.

  Nothing Cashel could see was different about it now, but the corridor seemed a little cheerier than it used to be. He smiled. He'd have started whistling if he could carry a tune.

  The Hunting Ground

  I read (and always have read) both science fiction and fantasy. Mr. Derleth insisted that SF was merely a subset of fantasy, but even if that's true (and I'm not sure it is) the statement doesn't accurately describe most people's perceptions. Still, because I move between fantasy and SF as a reader, it's been easy for me to write both.

  Nor do I see any reason that a horror story can't be SF. Many years ago Ramsey Campbell asked me for my choice of the ten top horror stories. One of those I picked instantly was "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin, a pure SF story which I find horrifying in ways that one more nut with a meat cleaver can never be.

  "The Cold Equations" proves my point in another fashion also. It's well known that John Campbell published the story in Astounding, the quintessentially hard-SF magazine. It's less well known that Godwin borrowed the plot from an EC horror comic. The boundaries between horror and SF are easily permeable.

  Ramsey Campbell asked me for a story for Superhorror, an original horror anthology he was putting together. The only criterion was that the story be a good one. (One of the best in the collection was "The Viaduct" by Brian Lumley, a slice of autobiography with no fantasy element whatever.)

  I chose to write a story that was SF in form, although it could have been done just as easily as a fantasy. Payment was to be 2 cents/word, but instead I traded the piece for the pencil rough draft of the novel Ramsey had just finished: his first, The Doll Who Ate His Mother.

  It's neither the science nor the could-be fantasy that makes "The Hunting Ground" a horror story; it's the character's situation. There's less fiction in that than I might wish.

  I came back from Nam with no physical damage and an absolute refusal to admit that there might be other problems. We-my wife and I-rented rooms in an old house that had been split into three apartments for students and other people without a lot of money.

  One of the nicest aspects of the house was the attached vacant lot. A large tree had been cut down a year or two past; the stump remained beside the driveway. I sat cross-legged on that stump, reading or writing, any time it wasn't raining. For whatever reason, it was what my soul needed.

  You'll find that stump in "The Hunting Ground." You'll also find an accurate description of a neighborhood of Durham, NC, just north of Duke's East Campus. And you'll find a part of me; but I emphasize, only a small part.

  The patrol car's tires hissed on the warm asphalt as it pulled to the curb beside Lorne. "What you up to, snake?" asked the square-bodied policeman. The car's rumbling idle and the whirr of its air conditioner through the open window filled the evening. Lorne smiled and nodded the lighted tip of his cigarette. "Sitting on a stump in my yard, watching cops park on the wrong side of the street. What're you up to, Ben?" Instead of answering, the policeman looked hard at his friend. They were both in their late twenties; the man in the car stocky and dark with a close-cropped mustache; Lorne slender, his hair sand-colored and falling across his neck brace. "Hurting, snake?" Ben asked softly.

  "Shit, four years is enough to get used to anything," the thinner man said. Though Lorne's eyes were on the chime tower of the abandoned Baptist church a block down Rankin Street, his mind was lost in the far past. "You know, some nights I sit out here for a while instead of going to bed."

  Three cars in quick succession threw waves of light and sound against the rows of aging houses. One blinked its high beams at the patrol car briefly, blindingly. "Bastard," Ben grumbled without real anger. "Well, back to the war against crime." His smile quirked. "Better than the last war they had us fighting, hey?"

  Lorne finished his cigarette
with a long drag. "Hell, I don't know, sarge. How many jobs give you a full pension after two years?"

  "See you, snake."

  "See you, sarge."

  The big cruiser snarled as Ben pulled back into the traffic lane and turned at the first corner. The city was on a system of neighborhood police patrols, an attempt to avoid the anonymous patrolling that turned each car into a miniature search and destroy mission. The first night he sat on the stump beside his apartment, Lorne had sworn in surprise to see that the face peering from the curious patrol car was that of Ben Gresham, his squad leader during the ten months and nineteen days he had carried an M60 in War Zone C.

  And that was the only past remaining to Lorne.

  The back door of Jenkins' house banged shut on its spring. A few moments later heavy boots began scratching up the gravel of the common drive. Lorne's seat was an oak stump, three feet in diameter. Instead of trying to turn his head, he shifted his whole body around on the wood. Jenkins, a plumpish, half-bald man in his late sixties, lifted a pair of canned Budweisers. "Must get thirsty out here, warm as it is."

  "It's always thirsty enough to drink good beer," Lorne smiled. "I'll share my stump with you."They sipped for a time without speaking. Mrs. Purefoy, Jenkins' widowed sister and a matronly Baptist, kept house for him. Lorne gathered that while she did not forbid her brother to drink an occasional beer, neither did she provide an encouragingly social atmosphere.

  "I've seen you out here at 3 a.m.," the older man said. "What'll you do when the weather turns cold?"

  "Freeze my butt for a while," Lorne answered. He gestured his beer toward his dark apartment on the second floor of a house much like Jenkins'."Sit up there with the light on. Hell, there's lots of VA hospitals, I'vebeen in lots of them. If North Carolina isn't warm enough, maybe they'd find me one in Florida." He took another swallow and said, "I just sleep better in the daytime, is all. Too many ghosts around at night."

  Jenkins turned quickly to make sure of the smile on the younger man's face. It flashed at his motion."Not quite that sort of ghost," Lorne explained. "The ones I bring with me…"And he kept his smile despite the sizzle of faces in the white fire sudden in his mind. The noise of popping, boiling flesh faded and he went on, "There was something weird going on last night, though-" he glanced at his big Japanese wristwatch-"well, damn early this morning."

  "A Halloween ghost with a white sheet?" Jenkins suggested.

  "Umm, no, down at the church," said Lorne, fumbling his cigarettes out. Jenkins shrugged refusal and the dart of butane flame ignited only one."The tower there was-I don't know, I looked at it and it seemed to be vibrating. No sound, though, and then a big red flash without any sound either. I thought sure it'd caught fire, but it was just a flash and everything was back to normal. Funny. You know how you hold your fingers over a flashlight and it comes through, kind of? Well, the flash was like that, only through a stone wall."

  "I never saw anything like that," Jenkins agreed. "Old church doesn't seem the worse for it, though. It'll be ready to fall down itself before the courts get all settled about who owns it, you know."

  "Umm?"

  "Fellowship Baptist built a new church half a mile north of here, more parking, and anyhow, it was going to cost more to repair that old firetrap than it would to build a new one." Jenkins grinned. "Mable hasn't missed a Sunday in forty years, so I heard all about it.

  The city bought the old lot for a boys' club or some such fool thing-I want to spit every time I think of my property taxes, I do-but it turns out the Rankins, that's who the street's named after too, they'd given the land way back before the Kaiser's War. Damn if some of them weren't still around to sue to get the lot back if it wasn't going to be a church anymore. So that was last year, and it's like to be a few more before anybody puts money into tearing the old place down."

  "From the way it's boarded up and padlocked, I figured it must have been a reflection I saw," Lorne admitted. "But it looked funny enough," he added sheepishly, "that I took a walk down there last night."

  Jenkins shrugged and stood up. He had the fisherman's trick of dropping the pull tab into his beer before drinking any. Now it rattled in the bottom. "Well," he said, picking up Lorne's can as well, "it's bed time for me, I suppose. You better get yourself off soon or the bugs'll carry you away."

  "Thanks for the beer and the company," Lorne said. "One of these nights I'll bring down an ice chest and we'll really tie one on."

  Lorne's ears followed the old man back, his boots a friendly, even sound in the warm April darkness. A touch of breeze caught the wisteria hedge across the street and spread its sweetness, diluted, over Lorne. He ground out his cigarette and sat quietly, letting the vines breathe on him. Jenkins' garbage can scrunched open and one of the empties echoed into it. The other did not fall. "What the hell?" Lorne wondered aloud. But there was something about the night, despite its urban innocence, that brought up memories from past years more strongly than ever before. In a little while Lorne began walking. He was still walking when dawn washed the fiery pictures from his mind and he returned to his apartment to find three police cars parked in the street.

  The two other tenants stored their cars in the side yard of the apartment house. Lorne had stepped between them when he heard adwoman scream, "That's him! Don't let him get away!"

  Lorne turned. White-haired Mrs. Purefoy and a pair of uniformed policemen faced him from the porch of Jenkins' house. The younger man had his revolver half-drawn. A third uniformed man, Ben, stepped quickly around from the back of the house. "I'm not going anywhere but to bed," Lorne said, spreading his empty hands. He began walking toward the others. "Look, what's the matter?"

  The oldest, heaviest of the policemen took the porch steps in a leap and approached Lorne at a barely restrained trot. He had major's pips on his shoulder straps. "Where have you been, snake?" Ben asked, but the major was between them instantly, growling, "I'll handle this, Gresham. Mr. Charles Lorne?"

  "Yes," Lorne whispered. His body flashed hot, as though the fat policeman were a fire, a towering sheet of orange rippling with the speckles of tracers cooking off…

  "… and at any time during the questioning you may withdraw your consent and thereafter remain silent. Do you understand, Mr. Lorne?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you see Mr. Jenkins tonight?"

  "Uh-huh. He came out-when did you leave me, Ben? 10:30?" Lorne paused to light another cigarette. His flame wavered like the blade of a kris. "We each drank a beer, shot the bull. That's all. What happened?"

  "Where did you last see Mr. Jenkins?"

  Lorne gestured. "I was on the stump. He walked around the back of the house-his house. I guess I could see him. Anyway, I heard him throw the cans in the trash and… that's all."

  "Both cans?" Ben broke in despite his commander's scowl.

  "No, you're right-just one. And I didn't hear the door close. It's got a spring that slams it like a one-oh-five going off, usually. Look, what happened?"

  There was a pause. Ben tugged at a corner of his mustache. Low sunlight sprayed Lorne through the trees. Standing, he looked taller than his six feet, a knobbly staff of a man in wheat jeans and a green-dyed T-shirt. The shirt had begun to disintegrate in the years since it was issued to him on the way to the war zone. The brace was baby-flesh pink. It made him look incongruously bullnecked, alien.

  "He could have changed clothes," suggested the young patrolman. He had holstered his weapon but continued to toy with the butt.

  "He didn't," Ben snapped, the signs of his temper obvious to Lorne if not to the other policemen. "He's wearing now what he had on when I left him."

  "We'll take him around back," the major suddenly decided. In convoy, Ben and the other, nervous, patrolman to either side of Lorne, and the major bringing up the rear, they crossed into Jenkins' yard following the steep downslope. Mrs. Purefoy stared from the porch. Beneath her a hydrangea bush graded its blooms red on the left, blue on the right, with the carefully tended acidity o
f the soil. It was a mirror for her face, ruddy toward the sun and gray with fear in shadow.

  "What's the problem?" Lorne wondered aloud as he viewed the back of the house. The trash can was open but upright, its lid lying on the smooth lawn beside it. Nearby was one of the Budweiser empties. The other lay alone on the bottom of the trash can. There was no sign of Jenkins himself.

  Ben's square hand indicated an arc of spatters six to eight feet high, black against the white siding. "They promised us a lab team but hell, it's blood, snake. You and me've seen enough to recognize it. Mrs. Purefoy got up at four, didn't find her brother. I saw this when I checked and…" He let his voice trail off.

  "No body?" Lorne asked. He had lighted a fresh cigarette. The gushing flames surrounded him.

  "No."

  "And Jenkins weighs what? 220?" He laughed, a sound as thin as his wrists. "You'd play hell proving a man with a broken neck ran off with him, wouldn't you?"

  "Broke? Sure, we'll believe that!" gibed the nervous patrolman.

  "You'll believeme, meatball!" Ben snarled."He broke it and he carried me out of a fucking burning shithook while our ammo cooked off. And by God-"

  "Easy, sarge," Lorne said quietly. "If anybody needs shooting, I'll borrow a gun and do it myself."

  The major flashed his scowl from one man to the other. His sudden uncertainty was as obvious as the flag pin in his lapel: Lorne was now a veteran, not an aging hippy.

  "I'm an outpatient at the VA hospital," Lorne said, seeing his chance to damp the fire."Something's fucking up some nerves and they're trying to do something about it there. Wish to hell they'd do it soon."

  "Gresham," the major said, motioning Ben aside for a low-voiced exchange. The third policeman had gone red when Ben snapped at him. Now he was white, realizing his mortality for the first time in his twenty-two years.

  Lorne grinned at him."Hang loose, turtle. Neither Ben or me ever killed anybody who didn't need it worse than you do."