Death & the Gravedigger's Angel

by Loretta Ross

  Robinson had gotten as far as opening the barn door and Jackson was nearly to his car. They stopped and came back.

  “There’s a light coming from the Hadleigh House,” she said.

  The men turned and looked. The second floor of the old mansion was just visible above the trees. A tiny blue light flashed from one of the upper windows.

  “It’s Morse code, I think,” Nichelle said. “But it spells out OSO.”

  Death felt a sick shock run through him and settle in his stomach. “Wren,” he said. “It’s Wren. Tyler must have come back looking for the cell phone. She’s calling for help.” He started down the steps, then turned back, imploring them to understand. “It’s the only Morse code she knows. SOS. But she always gets the letters mixed up!”

  _____

  Jones hit the door again and the wardrobe scooted a good four inches. He stuck his whole arm through the gap, firing wildly and taking out a window. Wren ducked away, turned off her light, and turned to face the door.

  One more good push and it would be open enough to admit him. There was no time to climb out the window. He and his gun were going to be right here in the room with her any second.

  twenty-one

  “You wait here. I’m on it,” Jackson shouted, jumping in his cruiser and peeling out of the parking lot in a spray of gravel.

  “Like hell,” Randy spat, heading for the Jeep. The Robinsons were right behind him. “How far is it by road?”

  “Two and a half, maybe three miles?” Kurt Robinson shook his head. “The road curves so much … ”

  They reached the vehicle, and it just then dawned on Randy that his brother wasn’t with him. He turned back and Death was still standing on the porch steps, staring up at the dark bulk of the Hadleigh House.

  “Death? Are you coming? Do you want to wait here? Death?”

  Death glanced at him, then back up the hill. Three miles by road. Just a couple hundred yards on foot, but straight uphill and he knew his lungs would never take it. At worst, he’d pass out somewhere and they’d have to send someone to rescue him. At best, he’d arrive out of breath and useless to help his Wren.

  Inside the barn, Sugar fidgeted. He was still saddled.

  “Death,” Randy said, voice low with worry. “Death, that’s a really bad idea.”

  _____

  Wren pushed the window up one last inch, deliberately forcing it and making it shriek. She took the last of the fuses from her pocket and dumped them out, sending them rattling and tumbling down the steep slope of the kitchen roof. Then she ducked back, very quietly, into the corner behind the door and waited.

  Tyler Jones, muttering and cursing, shoved the door. He had to have turned his back and put his legs into it, making one big final push. The wardrobe scraped and skidded over the wooden floor and he came in, a tall, gaunt shadow against the moonlight.

  He crossed, limping, in front of her, casting a misshapen silhouette across the floor, and leaned to peer out the open window, leading with his gun. Wren rose silently from the deep black behind him, crept up close, and swung her makeshift cosh at him as hard as she could.

  She was aiming for the back of his head, but he moved at the last minute. She still caught him in the head, but it struck him between the shoulder blades first and deflected some of the force. He toppled forward and lost his gun. It skittered and tumbled down the dark shingles and disappeared over the edge.

  She stooped and caught at his legs, trying to pick him up and force him headfirst out the window, but he got one hand on the windowsill, and as she pushed his legs and lower body through he was reaching back to grab at her.

  “Jezebel!” he spat. “Harlot! She-devil! Demon!”

  He got hold of her hair and she swung her cosh wildly, cracking it into his elbow, bloodying his nose.

  “Wow, you’re nuts,” she said, trying to pull away.

  Seeking some form of leverage, trying desperately to keep from being forced out the window, he got one hand on the neckline of her blouse. Not even thinking, acting purely on reflex, Wren slapped his face hard enough to raise a welt.

  He let go and she pressed her advantage, swinging her weapon at his face and his ribs and his fingers where he was gripping the window frame. He looked like some kind of mutant lizard, clinging to the side of the house.

  “Give me the phone,” he demanded. “I know you have it. Give it to me now.”

  Wren pulled her cell phone from her pocket. “This phone?”

  Jones’ eyes fastened on the phone and his face lit with manic avarice. “Yes!”

  “If you want it, get it,” she said. The window he had shot out earlier was six feet to her right and also looked out over the kitchen roof. She tossed the phone through it, hearing it hit and slide away. Jones startled and dived toward it.

  Wren helped him out with a vicious shove. Without waiting to see if he fell or not, she turned and ran.

  _____

  Death ran into the lighted barn and led Sugar out, holding his mane.

  “Buddy, I need a ride up the hill,” he said. “My girl’s in trouble up there and I can’t get there on my own. Do you think you could help me out?”

  The big horse stamped and snorted and shook his mane. Death chose to take that as a yes.

  “Come on, man,” Randy said. “Don’t do anything stupid. Listen, I’ll run up the hill and find out what’s going on. You can take the car around the road and be there in time to help me clean up.”

  In Death’s ears that came out as “you sit here and wait while the two people you love most are in danger.”

  Mounting was still awkward for him, a time-consuming struggle. With no time to spare, he led the horse over to the gate to the field and climbed the gate until he could swing himself into the saddle. Sugar stood patiently, allowing him to get settled.

  “It’s dark. It’s wet and slippery. There are probably limbs and branches down and places washed out.” Randy ran one hand through his hair in frustration. “You’re not that good a horseman, Death.”

  “I don’t have to be,” Death said. “Sugar’s that good a horse. Catch up when you can.”

  He wound the reins in his right hand and, with his left, gripped the saddle horn. He clicked his tongue and tapped Sugar in the flank with his right heel, and Sugar turned and bore him into the night.

  _____

  Wren slipped and skidded, going around the wardrobe and through the door and then making a sharp left turn toward the stairs. The thought in her mind was to get out of the house and make a run through the woods to the vets’ camp. They had power. Maybe there’d be a working phone down there. In any case, they’d have lights and vehicles and they’d know what to do when under attack.

  Since this began, she’d been running in a state of controlled panic, and she didn’t know how much longer she could continue, or how many more showdowns she could emerge from victorious. Her haste, though, was her undoing. As she came out of the bedroom at a dead run and tried to pivot, her foot slipped out from under her and she fell flat, knocking the wind out of herself. She lay there helpless, choking and struggling to draw in a breath, while a lack of oxygen set off a roaring in her ears.

  She put her head down and concentrated on drawing air into her lungs. The first breath was a long, painful wheeze. She was trembling and her heart thudded against the old wooden floorboards beneath her. Her hearing returned with her breathing.

  Within the bedroom behind her, a series of thumps and scrapes told her that Jones had not fallen off the roof and that he was, even now, fighting his way back in the window.

  Wren took one more gulping, gasping breath and forced herself back to her feet. Her legs felt like jelly and she couldn’t imagine how it was that her knees still held her. She heard one more loud bang and a vicious muttering, too low for her to make out any words, and she turned again and ran for the stairs.

  _____

  The path between the fence and the edge of the trees was barely wide enough for Sugar at the best of
times. The fence marked the property line and Robinson had never made any provisions for riding through there. Now, in the aftermath of the thunderstorm, wet branches drooped across the trail and saplings leaned in as if reaching out their spindly arms to catch at passers-by.

  It had not escaped Death that he was riding the same trail, on the same horse, that Harriman had ridden to his death, but he didn’t bother worrying about it. If Sugar was still traumatized by the experience, he didn’t show it. As for Death, he had more important things to worry about.

  They reached the point where the path angled off and headed uphill toward the Hadleigh House. This was the way he and Randy had come, the first day they accompanied Wren out to see the old, haunted plantation. Randy wasn’t with him, and Death suspected that he had headed off at an angle, fighting his way on foot through the brush and head-high sumac in an attempt to get up the hill first.

  The path was wider here, and as Sugar made the turn he gathered his legs under him and sped up. He was strong and fast and sleek and he seemed to understand both their destination and Death’s urgency in reaching it. Death leaned forward, over Sugar’s neck, and let the animal run.

  They rose through the stand of pine trees and through the old apple orchard with the white moon casting a mystical glow over the countryside and painting the world in a kaleidoscope of silver light and absolute shadow. In the field beyond the orchard, with the Hadleigh House framed against the sky, there was a fog rising from the underbrush.

  It had been less than twenty-four hours since he had proposed to Wren.

  He heard Randy struggling along behind him, shouting at him to slow down and wait, but he ignored him and urged his steed on. The wrought-iron fence that circled the garden had three gates, including the one across the driveway, but chances were that all three were closed. It was too high for the horse to jump, but he calculated that if he came up beside it he could drop off on the other side. Then he would have to circle the house, going for either the front or the back door and hoping that the one he chose was open.

  He was still two hundred feet away from the fence when a high-pitched shriek rent the night, sent a thrill of horror through him, and settled into his stomach with sick dread. It was a shrill wail of pain and terror that rose to a sharp peak and was abruptly silenced.

  _____

  Wren ran down the hall to the main staircase with the knowledge that Jones was just a few steps behind her. At the stairs, rather than risk running down them, she turned and slid down the curving bannister. At the bottom she dropped off and crouched down in the dark beside the staircase.

  Moonlight streaming through the window painted blue-white squares on the floor. She took stock of what she could see. There was an ottoman to her right, a stack of boxes tipped over and rifled, their contents spilling out, a tall floor lamp broken free of its base, and …

  Footsteps sounded overhead. She could hear doors being opened and closed. He was looking for her, but he didn’t know where she was.

  She picked up the floor lamp. It was a long, hollow iron bar that branched into three light sockets under a fringed shade. Wren turned it so the broken end of the bar was away from her, reached up, and slid it across the stairs as high as she could reach. Then she slammed her cosh down on the nearest step to draw Jones’ attention.

  There was an instant of breathless silence. A door slammed and then he was running full-out, headed for the stairs, determined to catch her. The house shivered with the rhythm of his feet along the hall. Now he was on the staircase, headed down. She waited until just before he got to the lamp base, then pulled down on the end of the lamp over her head. The near edge of the step it was on acted as a fulcrum. The rest of the metal rod rose up across Jones’ path and caught his foot, and he fell with a terrified shriek, abruptly silenced.

  For a long minute he lay crumpled and silent at the foot of the stairs. Wren hovered in the shadows, debating whether it would be wise to creep up and hit him a couple more times just to be safe. Then he groaned and dragged himself to his feet.

  He staggered around and saw her and his face, pale in the shadows, blanched even further.

  “What manner of she-devil are you,” he breathed, “that does not relent and will not die?”

  Wren blinked and tried her damndest to think of something witty to say. Nothing came to her. The hell with it, she thought. When in doubt, attack! She raised her sock-turned-weapon, swung it around her head, and yelled, “Yaaaarrrrgh!”

  And that was too much for Jones. He turned and ran.

  _____

  Sugar had halted with the sound of the scream coming from the Hadleigh House, horse and man alike stopped in their tracks. Death leaned forward in the saddle again and urged his mount on.

  “H’ya! H’ya! Giddyup! Giddyup!”

  The animal responded, driving forward and covering the ground between them and the mansion at a pace that sent the wind rushing past Death’s face. Sodden brush caught at his legs and soaked through his jeans and his heart pounded in time with Sugar’s hoof beats.

  They were almost at the fence, where Death could drop off onto the lawn, when a second yell sounded from within the house. The front door opened and Tyler Jones ran out, limping and staggering.

  He made a bizarre spectacle in the moonlight, a tall, gaunt figure like a scarecrow. He ran with an awkward, uneven gait, limbs flailing. His dark coat streamed out behind him and his hair stuck out around his head.

  Wren’s truck was still parked in the yard and Death was torn between pursuing Jones and going in search of her. Before he had to make a decision, she appeared. She was running after Jones, swinging some sort of weapon in circles over her head and screaming like a banshee.

  Jones was headed for the front gate and the Vengeance Trail. Death turned Sugar, following the old path along the fence that Doris, as a child, had taken to church on Sundays. Wren saw them and broke off her pursuit, turning instead toward her truck.

  Jones reached the gate and wrestled it open. He ran through and looked at Death, coming toward him on horseback. For a moment he froze, face a mask of horror.

  “No!” he shouted. “Oh dear God in heaven! No!”

  He dashed, in a blind panic, between the nearly bare branches of the lilac bushes, tripped going down the steps set into the path, and rolled to a stop at their foot.

  Death had intended to stop at the top of the steps, not wanting to risk injury to his horse, but Sugar ignored his command, leaped the shallow flight of stairs, and came to a halt the other side of the fallen man. He turned to stand over him and reared up on his hind legs, pawing the air with his front hooves.

  Death leaned forward and held on until the horse dropped back down to all four feet. Wren had appeared at the top of the path, holding one of the spears that went with her atlatl. Her other weapon was a weighted sweat sock. Her hair stood out around her head and her eyes glittered in the starlight.

  She looked, to the man who loved her, like a medieval shield maiden.

  “No!” Jones moaned, staring up into the darkness with a madness in his eyes. “God! No! Revelation 6:7-8! It has come to pass!”

  “What?” Wren demanded.

  Randy was panting and puffing along the trail behind her, and Jackson appeared running up the path from the road, his gun at the ready.

  “What was that? What did he say?”

  “Revelations,” Death said drily. “Revelations 6:7-8.”

  “But what is it?” she demanded. “I don’t have my phone. And it’s dead anyway. Do you have your phone? Look it up! Google it! I want to know what he said.”

  Randy was making a choking sound that his brother recognized as breathless laughter. Death sighed and shook his head.

  “I don’t have to look that one up,” he told Wren. “I know that one.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “‘When the Lamb broke the fourth seal,’” he quoted, “‘I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, ‘Come.’ I looked, and behold, a
n ashen horse.’”

  Jackson had reached them. He flipped Jones over and cuffed his hands behind his back.

  Death guided Sugar gingerly around them to the foot of the steps and Wren came halfway down so that she was within arm’s reach. He reached out and brushed one strand of damp hair from her cheek, tucked it behind her ear, and finished the verse. “‘And he who sat on it had the name Death,’” he said, “‘and Hades was following with him.’”

  epilogue

  “I wish I’d had a camera,” Wren said. “You should have seen him on that rearing horse, standing over Tyler Jones while Jones babbled and gibbered for mercy.”

  The day after their confrontation with the killer, the day after the massive thunderstorm, had dawned clear and bright, but with a bite to the air that signaled summer was well and truly over. Wren had taken the day off, with the Keystones’ blessing, and she and Death had slept in. It was mid-afternoon now and the twins and their wives had come over after the day’s sale to check on her and hear the story firsthand.

  Randy was there as well. They were waiting on pizza they’d ordered and her living room was crowded and homely. She thought, for a brief second, that she would miss this when she moved. But then again, she thought, she wouldn’t. The building would be different, but it was the people who filled her life with such warmth, and they weren’t going anywhere.

  “My brother’s a drama queen,” Randy teased.

  “Me?” Death squawked. “What makes you think I had anything to do with it? That was all the horse. Sugar’s the drama queen. I was just along for the ride. Besides, Wren was the one chasing him with a nine-ball in her sock.”

  “Are you saying I’m a drama queen?” she challenged.

  “I’m saying you’re a warrior maiden,” he clarified with a cheesy grin. “A really hot warrior maiden.”

  “Thank you. I like that better.”

  “Well, I for one am very disappointed in you,” Roy said.

  Wren gave him a hurt look.

  “What was it Jones said to you again? What kind of demon are you that won’t die? Something like that? And you couldn’t think of a single smartass thing to say?”