“What’s your desire?” it asked in a low voice.
I was terrified. Only one thought came to my mind: “To live.”
It nodded. “You will live.”
The light went out.
•
When I awoke, I found myself smeared with a sticky substance. A red fluid spread all around me. Even if this was very puzzling to the men who found me, nothing bad had happened to me. I was whole and healthy, and had survived – they told me later – a rather bad fall down a flight of stairs.
“I guess you won,” said Chester, looking strangely at me.
“Do you think it is gone?”
He shook his head gravely.
Things started to change for me. Someone recommended me for a better position and, within a short time, I was climbing the ladder of success. I became, after three years, the partner of Harry Linde, who had been until a few weeks before, the chief of Komplex 5.
Today, I’m running one of the biggest industrial centres of Europe. But a certain feeling of dread has never left me. Day after day, I watch the men going to work. Some won’t ever return. I wonder what price I paid and what tribute I deliver.
•••
Bobby Craneston was born in a quiet and ancient part of Germany. She is a musician, poet and author, as well as a student of ancient mysteries. Bobby started writing fiction at the early age of nine and continued working on short stories and books in the years to follow, living the life of a penniless but passionate artist. Accompanied by a small fan following in the UK, through the immeasurable wonders of the Internet, she is eager to spread words of magic and tales of bewilderment to any who will listen.
The Shredded Tapestry
By Ryan Harvey
The thieves who held up Richard Davey on the forest road from Munich to Regensburg must have been in a hurry. They left him with two valuables that men of their lot rarely leave their customers: his boots and his life.
Richard was thankful to have both, but the three men with handkerchiefs covering their faces, and pistols with cocked hammers, had taken away his sturdy horse and its saddle packs, which contained a hundred thalers and his sketchbooks filled with the clockwork devices he had studied on his long journey to Prague.
A moment later, Richard realized that the bandits had not ridden off suddenly into the October night out of generosity. Something large was moving through the brush at the road’s edge.
Richard, who still had his hands raised foolishly in the air, turned toward the rustling sound. Beech trees and nettles crowded the narrow road and, although the wind was not blowing, the leaves trembled.
Even though fear clutched at him, Richard’s mind was busy flipping through memories of the bestiaries he had read. What animals might haunt this stretch of forest road? Wolves hunted in Bavaria, but rarely so close to the cities. Perhaps it was a bear. Neither was a satisfying answer. He settled on a simple piece of knowledge: Animals would only rush a man who tried to flee.
But when the nettles shuddered again, and a low breathing soughed through the air, Richard hoped that a slow, indifferent walk would be almost the same as standing still.
He moved in his original direction on the road. The nettles rustled beside him, matching his steps.
His gut told him to run, but his mind ordered him to move cautiously. He came around a bend in the road and spied an orange light through the prison bars of beech trunks. If the light came from a cottage window, a fast run might get him to safety in time.
He gave thanks for the boots that were still on his feet as he sped up his steps. The movement in the nettles stopped. For a moment, Richard Davey felt that it was nothing more than a phantasm in his ruffled mind.
He looked behind him for assurance.
That was when he saw it.
Against the grey forest, a dreadful black had curled onto the road. It loomed as large as a bear, but its hair spiked wildly, making a diabolic outline. Yellow eyes reflected light without a source. The dark blotch had the feeling of something malignant and feline. Electricity, like rubbing the long fur of a cat on a winter morning, rippled over Richard’s skin.
When he heard the hiss, a pitiless sound that nothing in nature should make, he started to run. At any moment, he expected to feel the weight of forepaws and unsheathed claws dig into his back.
Suddenly, Richard’s fists were hammering against the oak of enormous double doors. He thought he had heard the padding of feet at his back, but perhaps it was only the echo of his own steps. The solid wood under his fists wrenched him back to his senses.
He looked behind him. There was no sign of anything on the road, no animal prints in the dirt. He had run only a short way, out of the eaves of the forest and onto a trail that split from the main road through an open gate.
He stepped back to look at the building he had run to in his panic. It was a large stone structure with a peaked wooden roof that reminded him of a church. But the churches of Bavaria have distinctive onion dome steeples, and this squat thing had no steeple at all – although Richard could sense where one might have stood. Above the double doors was a tympanum with a fresco, but wind and rain had long ago faded it to hazy outlines. In the darkness and the half-moon light, he could see little else except the edge of an outbuilding and patches of earth that could have grown the snowdrop and blue fairy thimble flowers of southern Germany, but instead held only crumbly soil.
Richard clutched at the fabric of his coat and took a moment to regain his composure. He had been years away from home, but never before had he felt so much a foreigner on the continent. His inquisitiveness, his skill in losing himself in brass rubbings and sketches of gears, often made him forget that months had passed since he had last heard a word of English.
Richard did not recall that he had knocked, so he twitched as the doors started to creak open. Although he felt foolish after his panic, he was relieved to see someone inhabited the grey place.
Warm light spilled from the crack. “Yes? What do you want?”
“If you please,” Richard said in his proficient boarding school German, “I’ve just been robbed. If you wouldn’t mind –”
The voice, which had a peculiar accent, interrupted: “You are out of breath. Are the thieves still near?”
“Uh, no –” Again, he felt a fool, as if he were still walking about with his hands stuck in the air. “I thought there was a large animal after me.”
The light spilled out onto the porch. “Inside! Inside now!” A hand grabbed Richard’s arm and tugged him between the doors. It happened so fast that he might have left his boots on the porch.
As he entered the vestibule, Richard felt a peculiar sensation around his legs. It was as if a fur shawl were rubbing between his ankles, slipping through the door crack and past him. But there was nothing to see after the man slammed shut the heavy doors and dropped down the bar.
“Pardon me, young man,” his abrupt host said, “but the highwaymen here are a vicious class and it’s best if they don’t spy you looking for help.”
Richard was about to mention that the man had reacted, not to news of robbers, but news of the stalking animal. However, the warmth of the inside and the chance for hospitality made him stay quiet. His natural curiosity, which thrived when his life was not in immediate danger of ending, was coming alive again.
The man was grey with age, but had the posture of a saint’s statue on a French cathedral. It was an easy comparison to make, for not only had Richard sketched the Chartres and Bourges Cathedrals, but his host wore the habiliments of a monk. His robes were a simple brown, with a heavy topcoat that draped down to his wrists. A black skullcap clung to his silver hair.
“I am Abbot Fletcher,” he said, with a bend at the waist. “You will be safe here for the night, and we can offer you modest food and drink. Please come this way.”
Richard followed the abbot into a chapel. He was wondering at the abbot’s unusual accent, which was familiar but drowned under the heavy gravy of German. “
So, this is a monastery?”
“Yes. When the nearby town of Kelheim converted to Luther’s heresy, they built this place as their church. Eventually, the righteous returned and burnt down the steeple in anger. That was two hundred and fifty years past. Our brotherhood has resided here since.”
Richard decided it was inappropriate to mention that he was a follower of the Anglican faith and had no love for the Pope. But he had nothing against the Pope’s followers, as he had learned from the kindness he had met so far in his journey across Bavaria. Highwaymen excepted.
Abbot Fletcher led him along the ambulatory into a room that might have once been a sacristy. Now it was decorated as a small banquet room. A fire struggled in a brick hearth, and an oil lamp added light from a table with Italian-style carvings on the legs. The rug spread across the floor had Moorish swirls, which Richard thought queer for a monastery.
The most striking furnishing in the room was an enormous tapestry covering the wall farthest from the door. While the abbot poured from a flagon of wine into tin goblets, Richard walked up to the hanging. On the thick wool was a distinctive stone bridge arching over a wide river toward a map of a city. Prominent in the middle span of the bridge was a statue of a child with his eyes covered, as if he were afraid to look on the unfinished cathedral at the end of the bridge.
“Regensburg,” Richard remarked.
“Indeed. Have you come that way?”
“I’m heading there now.” He gave a short explanation of his travels: He was hoping to reach Prague before winter so he could study the collections of Emperor Rudolf II. Richard was an admirer of mechanical devices and contraptions, and the sixteenth-century emperor was famous for his clockwork museum.
Richard placed his fingers on the grey weave of the tapestry that made the bridge. The abbot’s face turned stony and Richard pulled his hand back.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m eager to cross this bridge. It’s one of the finest in Europe, I hear. So firmly built, they say the Devil himself could not break it, although he once tried.”
The abbot turned back to the table. “The Devil is said to spend too much time in Regensburg. Too much time.”
Suddenly, Abbot Fletcher spoke in clear English with a slight Scottish burr. “You must excuse me, but your accent tells me that what I am now speaking is your first language.”
Richard felt a warmth swell that the tiny fire could never have made. To hear his own language, after so many months deep in Bavaria, was almost enough to bring tears. “I had wondered at the name ‘Fletcher’,” he said.
The abbot did not seem as moved to hear his mother tongue. He started to slice a hard rye and serve it onto pewter plates. “Do you see the church with the courtyard in the middle of the tapestry?” he asked. Richard had noted it, since its halo of gold thread dared the eye to look anywhere else. “That is – was – the Benedictine Abbey of St. James. Now this –” He gestured with disdain at the roof over him. “– is the Abbey.”
“The old Scots monastery?” Richard asked. “Are all of you Scotsmen, then?”
“At one time. But we are dwindling and the initiates who join now are more often German.” The abbot sat down in the tall-backed chair at the head of the table and motioned for Richard to sit near him.
“Why did you leave Regensburg? I know that the city converted, but I did not hear of them hurling out all the Catholics.”
The abbot sipped his wine. “All does not mean none. It’s a pitiful tale, not fit for an autumn night after the fright you’ve had. The summary of it is that one of our brethren fell prey to the Devil’s temptation and committed an ... indiscretion ... of which the city had little tolerance.”
When the abbot said the word indiscretion, Richard felt a prickle around his legs, like touching a brass doorknob in crisp winter. He remembered the strange sensation, as he entered the door, and the imagined feline thing on the road.
“That was before the lifetime of anyone here. We’ve gone forward in our brotherhood, quietly carrying on God’s work.” The way Abbot Fletcher swallowed his wine placed a period on the story and Richard asked no further. The abbot moved on to other topics and, at last, seemed to enjoy using his native language with a new listener. He listed the names of his brethren, of whom there were now only 12, and who were asleep in the dormitory attached to the old chapel.
At last, he came back to the events of the evening: “These woods have become treacherous. It must have been a large animal to have scared you so.”
“Well, perhaps I was nervous after being robbed. I might have imagined it.”
“Ah.”
The utterance told Richard that the abbot firmly believed that he had not imagined it.
The abbot finished his wine and pointed to the half-full goblet beside Richard’s plate. “I do not blame you for not finishing it. It’s a watery vintage from Kelheim. We have a wine cellar, but it ages only cobwebs now. There’s no need to keep a store for so few and the vineyards shrivelled years ago.”
There was something disquieting in the man’s tone that flamed Richard’s curiosity. But the night already held too many mysteries and exhaustion started to douse his inquisitiveness. Daylight would sweep the mysteries away, and Richard would find nothing more intriguing than a dying abbey and an empty road.
Richard finished his bread and then followed his host to his bed for the night. Abbot Fletcher explained that the upstairs room had once belonged to the Protestant deacon, that properly, the abbot should have it. But he preferred the company of his brothers in the dormitory. The room was a spartan place at the peak of the roof and the triangular shape gave Richard the comfortable feeling of sleeping in an old barn. There was a narrow bed and a writing desk, with an empty bottle of ink and an unlit candle. On the wall hung a garish crucifix, with Christ in more pain than Richard preferred to see.
“I’d be grateful if you could spare a horse tomorrow,” Richard said. “I’ll leave it at Kelheim and hire someone to return it.”
“We have no horses,” the abbot said brusquely. “Wild animals have killed them all.”
Richard knew not to ask questions. He had been eager for bed, but now he felt even more eager to wake up and be on his way.
The abbot bid him goodnight and shut the door. Richard covered the gruesome crucifix with his coat, feeling a pang of Anglican revulsion at the papist decor. He pulled off his boots and was asleep as soon as his head touched the musty mattress.
•
The wheezing breath woke him. Heavy curtains covered the only window, so he could not tell from the moon shadows how much time had passed. He shut his eyes, but the wheezing came again. It was slow, like a child’s hand pressing down a bellows. He remembered the sound in the nettles and the shape on the road, and his chest turned cold and his muscles rigid.
The sound crept just outside the door. Richard listened for it, hoping it was only the noise of his body against the sheets. But he was more still than he could ever remember holding himself in his life.
The sound now turned shrill, like a Yorkshire wind whistling through rocks. Then the shrilling changed into a hiss. The hiss of a cat.
Richard recalled the black fiend on the road. Eyes of yellow ichor, fur made from iron spikes gating a cemetery. But ... that had been his imagination ....
He stared into the dark around the doorway. The floorboards outside creaked. A creature was striding back and forth before the door, like a witch laying down a hex. Padded feet stretched the aged wood.
Richard wanted to pull the sheets over his head, but when he reached out, he found the mattress was bare. A childhood fear seized him: the tiny boy who felt that, if he could bury himself far enough under downy blankets, no night evil could touch him. Now, there was nothing between him and the night.
The boards stopped groaning. But then the door started. The wood shrieked from a great weight pushing from the other side. Bared claws scratched down it, mixing the infernal hiss with the peeling of slivers.
Richard backed into the corner of the bed and felt the stucco wall at his back. He tried to pull his eyes away from the door, but he could feel the black monster bristling right outside it.
The thing at the door hissed. But, although the scratching still raked down the wood, the breathing of the thing now seemed to move inside the cramped room. Richard again felt the scrape of fur over his skin. Now it moved across his arms, wending around his torso, tapering off with a sinuous tail. Whiskers like needles stabbed his cheek.
Richard focused his eyes on the vague lump of his coat on the wall, trying to pull his mind away from its hallucinations. The coat hovered in blackness. The wall and the crucifix where it hung were lost in the dark of the room.
Then the coat started to flutter from the wall and drift toward the bed. As it did, the scratching and the hissing stopped.
The coat turned inside out and a black lining flowed out into the shape of a tall woman in robes woven from midnight.
Richard tried to back through the wall. And, suddenly, he succeeded. The wall pushed away, the bed vanished ... he dropped through space.
Above him was a bridge, a huge span of bleak stones. Daggers of icy water jabbed into his back. The air was punched from his lungs and when he drew breath, the freezing water flooded in. Choking, he flailed out his arms.
His hands hit the stucco wall; he fell onto the mattress. The water and the bridge were gone. The woman was still there, a sliver of midnight at the foot of the bed.
“Who – who are you?” He felt as if he were spitting water from his lungs to say it.
A hand slipped from the night that shrouded her. Her skin was the colour of moonlight bleeding through swamp vapours. Yet, it was a relief from the Stygian cloak of the rest of her ... and he had not even dared to try to look her in the face.
Candle in the Attic Window Page 7
