A Stark and Wormy Knight

by Tad Williams

  “Tell Jenkins he’s getting sloppy,” he said. “I can’t imagine you giving him a night off in the old days without finishing the cleaning. Looks like he hasn’t dusted in weeks.”

  “I’ll tell him,” said his godfather. “Go on, go on. I’ll see you very soon.”

  But Nightingale did not go through the doorway. Instead, he turned and slowly walked back into the room. “Uncle Edward,” he said. “Are you certain you’re going to be all right? I mean, the power’s still off. You can’t breathe without your ventilator.”

  “The generator can run for hours and hours. It’ll shut itself off when the regular power comes back.” He waved his hand testily. “Go on, Nate. I’m fine.”

  “But the strange thing,” said Nightingale, “is that when the generator came on half an hour ago, the ventilator didn’t. There must be something wrong with it.”

  Arvedson went very still. “What…what are you talking about?”

  “Here. Look, the little lights on it never came back on, either. Your ventilator’s off.” The room suddenly seemed very quiet, nothing but the distant sound of cars splashing along out on Jones Street, distant as the moon. “What happened to Edward?”

  The old man looked surprised. “I don’t…Nate, what are you saying…?”

  The gun was out of Nightingale’s coat and into his hand so quickly it might have simply appeared there. He leveled it at a spot between the old man’s two bushy white eyebrows. “I asked you what happened to Edward — the real Edward Arvedson. I’m only going to ask this once more. I swear I’ll kill him before I let you have his body, and I’m betting you can’t pull your little possession trick again on a full-grown, healthy man like me – especially not before I can pull the trigger.”

  Even in the half-light of the desk lamp, the change was a fearful one: Edward Arvedson’s wrinkled features did not alter in any great way, but something moved beneath the muscles and skin like a light-shunning creature burrowing through the dark earth. The eyes fixed his. Although the face was still Edward’s, somehow it no longer looked much like him. “You’re a clever boy, Nightingale,” said the stranger in his godfather’s body. “I should have noticed the ventilator never came back on, but as you’ve guessed, this sack of meat no longer has a breathing problem. In fact, it no longer needs to breathe at all.”

  “What’s happened to him?” The gun stayed trained on the spot between the old man’s eyes. “Talk fast.”

  A slow, cold smile stretched the lips. “That is not for me to say, but rather it is between him and his god. Perhaps he is strumming a harp with the other angels now…or writhing and shrieking in the deepest pits…”

  “Bastard!” Nightingale pulled back the trigger with his thumb. “You lie! He’s in there with you. And I know a dozen people who can make you jump right the hell back out…”

  The thing shook its head. “Oh, Mr. Nightingale, you’ve been playing the occult detective so long you’ve come to believe you’re really in a story – and that it will have a happy ending. We didn’t learn new ways to possess the living.” The smile returned, mocking and triumphant. “We have learned how to move into the bodies of the recently dead. Quite a breakthrough. It’s much, much easier than possession, and we cannot be evicted because the prior tenant…is gone. Your ‘Uncle Edward’ had a stroke, you see. We waited all around him as he died – oh, and believe me, we told him over and over what we would do, including this moment. Like you, he caused us a great deal of trouble over the years — and as you know, we dead have long memories. And when he was beyond our torments at last, well, this body was ours. Already my essence has strengthened it. It does not need to breathe, and as you can see…” The thing rose from the wheelchair with imperial calm and stood without wavering. Nightingale backed off a few steps, keeping the gun high. “…it no longer needs assistance to get around, either,” the thing finished. “I feel certain I’ll get years of use out of it before I have to seek another – time enough to contact and betray all of the rest of Edward Arvedson’s old friends.”

  “Who are you?” Nightingale fought against a despair that buffeted him like a cold wind. “Oh, for the love of God, what do you monsters want?”

  ““Who am I? Just one of the hungry ones. One of the unforgiving.” It sat down again, making the wheelchair creak. “What do we want? Not to go quietly, as you would have us go – to disappear into the shadows of nonexistence and leave the rest of you to enjoy the light and warmth.” The thing lifted its knotted hands – Edward’s hands, as they had seemed such a short time ago – in a greedy gesture of seizure. “As you said, this is a war. We want what you have.” It laughed, and for the first time the voice sounded nothing at all like his godfather’s familiar tones. “And we are going take it from you. All of you.”

  “I don’t think so. Because if you need bodies to survive here, then those bodies can be taken back from you…” And even as Nightingale spoke his gun flashed and roared and the thing in his godfather’s shape staggered and fell back against the wheelchair cushions, chin on chest. A moment later the so-familiar face came up again. Smiling.

  “Jenkins,” it said. “If you would be so kind…”

  Something knocked the gun from Nightingale’s hand and then an arm like an iron bar slammed against his neck. He fought but it was like being held by a full-grown gorilla. His struggles only allowed him to slide around enough in his captor’s grip to see Jenkins’ blank eyes and the huge hole in the side of the caretaker’s head crusted with bits of bone and dried tissue.

  “I lied about giving him the night off,” said the pseudo-Edward. “The living get impatient, but my colleague who inhabits him now was perfectly willing to stand in the dark until I needed him.” Now Arvedson’s body stood again, brushing at its clothes; the hole Nightingale’s gunshot had made in its shirt was bloodless. “Bullets are a poor weapon against the risen dead, Nightingale,” it pointed out with no little satisfaction. “You could burn the body, I suppose, or literally pulverize it, and there would be nothing left for us to inhabit. But of course, you will not get the chance to tell anyone about that.”

  “Bastards!” He struggled helplessly against the Jenkins-thing’s grip. “Even if you kill me, there are hundreds more like me out there. They’ll stop you!”

  “We will meet them all, I’m sure,” said his godfather’s body. “You will introduce us – or at least the new resident of your corpse will. And one by one, we will remove them. The dead will live, with all the power of age and riches and secrecy, and the rest of your kind will be our uncomprehending cattle, left alive only to breed more bodies for us. Your driver was right, Mr. Nightingale – the storm door really is open now. And no power on this earth can shut it.”

  Nightingale tried to say something else then, shout some last words of defiance, but the pressure on his neck was crushingly strong and the lights of the world — the lamp, the headlights passing in the street below, even the storm-shrouded stars beyond the window — had begun leaching away into utter darkness.

  His last sight was of the cold, hungry things that had been hiding behind that darkness, hiding and waiting and hating the living for so long, as they hurried toward him to feed.

  The Stranger’s Hands

  PEOPLE IN THE VILLAGE HAD BEEN whispering for days about the two vagabonds in Squire’s Wood, but the boy Tobias was the first to speak to them.

  Tobias was a somewhat wayward lad, and the fact that he should have been grazing his father’s sheep on the hill above the forest at that hour more or less assured the sheep in question would be wandering along the shady edges of the wood instead, with Tobias wandering right behind them.

  It was not until he saw a drift of smoke twining like a gray scarf through the trees that the boy remembered that strangers had been seen in the wood. He felt a moment of fear: why would anyone live out of doors in the cold nights and flurries of autumn rain if they were God-fearing folk? Only robbers and dangerous madmen dwelt under the unsheltered sky. Everyone knew that.
If he had been a fraction less headstrong, Tobias would have turned around then and hurried back to the hillside, perhaps even remembering to take his father’s sheep with him, but there was a part of him, a strong part, that hated not knowing things worse than anything. It was the part that had once caused him to pull the leg off a frog, just to find out what it would do. (It did very little, and died soon after with what Tobias felt guiltily certain was an accusatory look in its bulging eyes.) It was also the reason he had dented his father’s best scythe when he had used it to try to cut down a tree, and why he had dumped the contents of his mother’s precious sewing basket all over the ground — a search for knowledge that ended with Tobias spending all afternoon in the fading light on his hands and knees, locating every last needle and pin he had spilled. Once this rebel voice had even led him several miles out of the village, on a quest for the town of Eader’s Church, which he had heard was so big that the streets actually had names. His father and two other men had caught up to him an hour after sunset as he sat exhausted and hungry by the side of the road. He had got a whipping for it, of course, but for young Tobias whippings were part of the cost of doing business.

  So now, instead of turning and leaving the woods and its perilous inhabitants behind (for the sake of his father’s livestock if nothing else) he followed the trail of smoke back to its source, a small cookfire in a clearing. A small man with a ratlike face was tending the flames, his wrinkles made so deep and dark by grime he looked like an apple-doll. His large companion, who sat on a stone beside the fire and did not look up even when Tobias stepped on a twig and made the little man jump, was so odd to look at that the boy could not help shivering. The large man’s head was shaved, albeit poorly in some places, and the skull beneath the skin bulged in places that it should not. His bony jaw hung slack, the tongue visible in the space between top and bottom teeth, and although he did not seem blind, the eyes in the deep sockets were dull as dirty stones.

  If the big man was paying no attention, the little man was. He stared at Tobias like a dog trying to decide whether to bark or run.

  “Your wood’s too wet,” the boy told him.

  “What?”

  “You’ll get mostly smoke and little fire from that. Do you want smoke?”

  The small man frowned, but in dismay, not anger. “I want to cook this fish.” He had the sound of a southerner, the words stretched and misshapen. Tobias wondered why they couldn’t learn to speak properly.

  He squinted at the man’s supper with the eye of an experienced angler. “It’s small.”

  “It’s better than starving,” the man pointed out.

  “Well, then, I’ll show you.” Tobias quickly found enough dry wood to rebuild the fire and within a short time the little man was cooking the fish over it on a long stick. His large companion still had not moved or spoken, had not even seemed to notice the newcomer in their camp.

  “Thanks for your kindness,” the small man said. “I am Feliks. We are new to this.”

  “My name’s Tobias,” the boy said, basking in the glow of his own helpfulness. “What does that mean, new?”

  “We have been living somewhere there was food.” Feliks shrugged. “The food ran out.”

  Tobias stared at the other man, who still gazed at nothing, only the slow movement of his chest behind his dark, travel-worn robe showing that he was something other than a statue. “What’s his name?”

  Feliks hesitated for a moment. “Eli.” He said it in the southern way, the last syllable rising like a shorebird’s cry – Eh-lee. “He was my master, but he…something happened to him. He lost his wits.”

  Tobias now examined the big man with unhidden interest – if he had no wits, it couldn’t be rude to stare, could it? “What happened?”

  “The roof fell on him.” Feliks took the fish from the stick, burning his fingers so that he almost dropped it – Tobias was amused by how many things the man didn’t know how to do – and then cut it into two pieces with a knife, handing the larger piece to the silent giant. Eli moved for the first time; he took fish without looking at it, put it in his mouth, and chewed with bovine patience. Feliks began to eat the other piece, then turned shamefacedly to Tobias. “I should offer some to you, for your kindness.”

  Tobias was old enough to understand this would not be a small sacrifice for Feliks. “No, I’ll eat at home. And I’d better go now or Father will have the strap out.” He looked through the trees to the angle of the sun, which was definitely lower than he would have liked. “He’ll have the strap out, anyway.” The boy stood. “I’ll come back tomorrow, though. I can help you catch better fish than that one.” He hesitated. “Have you been to other places? Other villages, even towns?”

  Feliks nodded slowly. “Many places. Many cities all over the Middle Lands.”

  “Cities!” Tobias swayed a little, faint-headed at the thought. “Real cities? I’ll be back!”

  The tall man named Eli suddenly put out his hand, a gesture so startling after his hour of near-immobility that Tobias recoiled as though from a snake.

  “He…I think he wants to thank you,” Feliks said. “Go ahead, boy – take his hand. He was a great man once.”

  Tobias slowly extended his own small hand, wondering if this might be the beginning of some cruel or even murderous trick – if he had been too trusting after all. Eli’s hand was big, knob-knuckled and smudged with dirt, and it closed on the boy’s slim fingers like a church door swinging closed.

  Then Tobias vanished.

  * * *

  When two days had passed with no sign of the boy, suspicion of course fell on the two strangers living in Squire’s Wood. When the man named Feliks admitted that they had seen the child and spoken to him, the shireward and several local fellows dragged them out of the forest and chained them in wooden stocks beside the well in the center of the village, where everyone could see them and marvel at their infamy. Feliks tearfully continued to insist that they had done nothing to harm the boy, that they did not know where he had gone – both things true, as it turned out – but even if the two men had not been strangers and thus naturally suspect, the villagers could see that the big one was plainly touched, perhaps even demon-possessed, and almost no one felt anything for them but horror and disgust.

  The lone exception was Father Bannity, the village priest, who felt that it was a troubling thing to imprison people simply because they were strangers, although he dared not say so aloud. He himself had been a stranger to the village when he had first arrived twenty years earlier (in fact, older villagers still referred to him as “the new priest”) and so he had a certain empathy for those who might find themselves judged harshly simply because their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were not buried in the local churchyard. Also, since in his middle-life he had experienced a crisis of faith, leading him to doubt many of the most famous and popular tenets of his own religion, he was doubly unwilling to assume the guilt of someone else simply because they were not part of the familiar herd. So Father Bannity took it on himself to make sure the two prisoners had enough food and water to survive. It would be a long wait for the King’s Prosecutor General to arrive – his circuit covered at least a dozen villages and lasted a full cycle of the moon – and even if the two were guilty of killing the poor child and hiding his body, Father Bannity did not want them to die before this could be discovered for certain.

  As the small man, Feliks, grew to trust him, he at last told Bannity what he swore was the true story of what had happened that day, that the boy had touched big Eli’s hand and then disappeared like a soap bubble popping. Father Bannity was not quite certain what to think, whether this was a true mystery or only the precursor to a confession, a man easing gradually into a guilty admission as into a scalding bath, but he stuck by his resolution to treat them as innocent until they told him otherwise, or events proved the worst to have happened.

  One day, as he was holding a ladle of water to Eli’s dry lips, the big man suddenly looked at him al
most as if seeing him for the first time, a flash of life in the dull, bestial eyes that Bannity had not seen before. Startled, the priest dropped the ladle. The big man lifted his hand as far as he could with his wrist restrained by the stocks and spread his long fingers like some strange flower blooming.

  “Don’t,” whispered Feliks. “That’s what the boy did.”

  Father Bannity hesitated for only a moment. Something in the big man’s strange gaze, something solemn and distant but not unkind, convinced him. He reached out and allowed Eli’s hand to fold around his.

  For a startling moment Bannity thought he had become a fish, jerked thrashing out of the river and up into the daylight, blinded by the sun and its prismatic colors, dazzled by the burning air. Then, a half-instant later, he realized it was as though he had been out of the water for years, and now had suddenly been plunged back into it: everything that had withered in him suddenly sprang back to life, all the small losses of the passing days and months — color, feeling, ecstasy. The feeling was so strong, so overwhelming, that he could not even answer Feliks’ worried questions as he staggered away.

  Bannity knew again. He had forgotten what it felt like, but now he remembered, and the thunderous force of belief returning betrayed how much he had lost. God had sent him a miracle in the person of the silent giant, and with that single touch, a world which had slowly turned gray around him over the years had been kindled back into flaming life.

  God was in everything again, just as He had been when Bannity had been a child, when he had been able to imagine nothing better than to serve Him.

  God was alive inside him. He had experienced a miracle.

  It was only when the first surge of ecstatic happiness had become a little more ordinary, if no less pleasurable, that Father Bannity realized nothing tangible had actually changed. It wasn’t so much that God had shown him a miracle, a sign, it was more as if touching the giant’s hand had reawakened him to the love of God he had once had, but which had slipped away from him.