The Sword of Straw

by Amanda Hemingway

  The next few minutes were something that, all his life, Nathan preferred to forget. He tried not to scream—heard his breath hissing between gritted teeth—but he couldn’t help himself. Even when the cigarette was removed the pain didn’t stop. The tip had gone dark but Damon inhaled and the circle of smolder revived, winking at him like a tiny eye of fire. Then more pain. Behind the pain, small cold thoughts ran through the part of Nathan’s mind that was still him. Woody would hear his cries—he might go to Bartlemy—but how long would it take? How long did he have? How far would Damon go? He kept asking about the cup, but Nathan didn’t think he really expected an answer. He managed to say “I don’t know” and “I wouldn’t tell you if I did,” a pointless gesture of defiance that he realized, even as the words came out, would only make his tormenter angrier and more cruel. Ram and Ginger seemed very far away: he and Damon were enclosed in a cell of pain, one enjoying, the other suffering, bound together in a hideous intimacy.

  At one point Nathan’s eyes watered with the pain, and Damon saw, relishing it, mocking his tears, but at least he didn’t beg, if that meant anything. He knew it wouldn’t do any good.

  Eventually, Ram said: “He don’t know shit. He’d of told you if he did. We ought to get on with the job.”

  “This is the job,” Damon said. “Part of it.” He was smiling a strange, shut-lipped smile.

  “Someone might come—or hear him.”

  “Who?” Damon looked contemptuous.

  “Blokes walking dogs—people like that. It’s daylight. Let’s dump him and go.”

  “Ram’s right. We oughtta get out of here.” Ginger. Out of the corner of his eye, Nathan saw he looked very pale, his acne scars standing out as bright red flecks. He might hit people and bite rottweilers, but he didn’t do slow torture.

  Reluctantly, Damon allowed himself to be persuaded. “Okay. Tape his mouth and stick him in the van.” And, to Nathan: “I’ll get back to you later.”

  “We don’t want to hold on to him, do we?” Ram protested. “He’s no more use to us.”

  “We can’t let him go,” Damon said coolly. “Not after this.”

  “But…you can’t mean…” Ram faltered, running out of questions. Afraid of the answers.

  You can’t mean murder, Nathan thought, somewhere behind the fog of agony. Ram had let go of him and he sagged forward, supported only by Ginger and the tree. Damon wouldn’t really do it—would he? But it happened—he had heard of cases—he wasn’t sure if they were fact or fiction—boys killing other boys out of sadism, savagery, experimental cruelty. He had a sudden fleeting vision of the court case—Damon’s parents and sister—cameras—interviews—hate mail and headlines and public opprobrium. It made him feel vaguely sick. But despite the nausea—despite his fear and pain—he thought once again: This is all so stupid. It might yet be a thought to die on.

  Damon had opened the back of the van and taken something out. A long zip carrier, meant for a pair of skis, only what was inside didn’t seem to be ski-shaped. He unzipped, and took it out. A shotgun.

  “Where did you get that?” Ram’s voice was rising to a squeak. “You said it was your sports gear. You didn’t say—”

  “It’s my father’s. He has a license for it.” Damon broke the gun in an expert manner and loaded both barrels with shot from his pocket. “This’ll fix the old man. And his dog.”

  Nathan’s heart chilled.

  “I don’t like it,” Ginger said. “I don’t do guns.”

  “You won’t be using it. Shove the half-breed in here for the moment and let’s get moving.”

  They sealed his mouth with the rest of the tape and pitched him back in the van, slamming the doors. He heard the rustle of dead leaves and the crack of twigs as they retreated. Heading for Thornyhill Manor. For Uncle Barty and Hoover. With the gun. Nathan wriggled around and kicked against the doors, hoping against hope that someone would hear. Woody…but how could a woodwose get into the van? A stray dog walker…Anyone. His nausea worsened but he knew, if he threw up, he would asphyxiate. The pain in his chest ate into him.

  No one came.

  In the living room at Thornyhill, Bartlemy extinguished the spellfire and sat down to wait. He had seen only glimpses, but it was enough to tell him to expect visitors, enough to make him deeply and quietly angry. He couldn’t remember being angry for a long time, a hundred years or more. He could still be shocked, once in a while, for all his experience—disgusted, mildly surprised, but not angry, not that dreadful rocky anger that shakes the heart and has to be cooled and checked lest it overrule the head. “It’s because I love the boy,” he said to Hoover. “And Annie. I love them both.” And he knew that love, too, was a word he hadn’t used or thought in longer still, many centuries. Time had made him compassionate, tolerating and understanding human foibles, and he was always kind, but detached, faintly aloof, a being apart from the rest of mankind. Until now.

  Hoover didn’t thump his tail in agreement as he would usually have done, or pant, or loll his tongue. He stood by the kitchen door, ears cocked, looking somehow different from his normal self, less doggy, as if something feral in his ancestry had come to the fore, a trace of wolf, jackal, hyena. His face seemed wilder, his mane more shaggy, his stance alert, poised for movement—or attack. Maybe it was only the late sunlight streaming through a nearby window that turned his brown eyes to yellow flame.

  Bartlemy gave him a nod and he slipped out through the kitchen so swiftly he was gone in a breath, his big paws noiseless on the flagstone floor.

  The old man waited.

  Presently he saw a shadow flit past the window—a rather clumsy flit, with much hesitation and looking-over-the-shoulder. Ram, he thought. A two-pronged invasion. Or probably three, with Ginger going around the other side. If his rate of approach was anything like Ram’s, groping forward while glancing back, they would collide head-on at the rear door. Damon, on the other hand…

  The knocker sounded at the front. Three loud knocks, sharp and imperative. Bartlemy rose, and went to open the door.

  The spellfire hadn’t shown him the gun.

  THERE WAS a face at the window of the van, glimpsed as a mere flicker at the tail end of Nathan’s vision. A face that darted into view and then vanished, darted and vanished again. Not Woody—a swarthy, wrinkled, whiskery face, almost like that of a small animal, shaggy-browed and warty-nosed, with a bristle of hair on the top. Nathan tried to make some sound apart from kicking but all that came out was Mm…mmf…mmmf. The watcher—whoever he was—appeared to have gone, and Nathan was filled with a despair so intense it was almost worse than the pain. But only for a minute or two. Then someone leapt on the hood, darkening the windshield, and there was a whirling motion and an impact that shattered the glass into a web of tiny cracks. Fists or feet punched the fragments inward, and a dark small figure ducked through the gap and sprang nimbly into the back of the van. The tape was ripped from Nathan’s mouth; a knife hacked at his bonds.

  It’s the dwarf, Nathan realized, even before he looked around. Of course…

  He tried to say thank you—please—hurry—but the words didn’t come out right. The skin around his mouth smarted and the burns on his chest seared into him. Then his arms and legs were free but so cramped from long confinement he could barely move. He managed to open the rear doors and half stumbled, half fell onto the ground.

  “Ye maun just sit there a wee while,” the dwarf said in his strange guttural brogue, assisting Nathan to heave himself into a sitting position propped against a wheel. He wore a few ragged garments that matched the leathery texture of his skin and the wiry thicket of his hair. His short knife was thrust through the knotted thongs that served him as a belt; also the ax he must have used to break the windshield. The rank fox-and-unwashed-dwarf odor hung around him like a miasma.

  Nathan had never been so glad to see anyone.

  “Thanks,” he said, more coherently this time. “I don’t know why you—”

  “Ye ha’ no ca
use to thank me,” the dwarf interrupted. “I were merely returning a weal for a weal. Ye set me free; I set ye free. My folk dinna care to be indebted.”

  “Well…thanks anyway. But I must get moving—I must get to Thornyhill. They’ve gone there now, and Damon’s got a gun.” He was massaging his legs as he spoke, trying to kick-start his circulation with fingers still partially numb.

  “A gun? What is ’t?”

  “Like a bow and arrow, only nastier. Much nastier. It fires lead pellets, incredibly fast. They plow through you, ripping holes in your body.”

  “Men are iver fixing to come up wi’ new ways o’ killing,” the dwarf said philosophically. “I wouldna worry about the old one, if I were you. I reckon he’s well accustomed to taking care o’ hissel. And there’s the hound. I doubt there’s many would get past him.”

  It was a long speech for Nambrok, but Nathan wasn’t reassured. “You don’t understand,” he said. “There’s no magic that stops a gun—not that I know of.” He scrambled to his feet, leaning against the van, then lurching a few steps forward. “I ought to call the police, but I haven’t even got my cell phone. I must get there.”

  “Mebbe I’d best help ye a ways,” said the dwarf, winding a sinewy arm around Nathan’s waist, which was as high as he could reach.

  Together, the unlikely pair tottered off through the woods.

  BARTLEMY GLANCED down at the gun, and then up into Damon’s face. Like Nathan, he saw the darkness in his eyes, a cloud obscuring rational thought, and in the dark the glint of something not normal, not human. Behind, in the house, he heard voices, and the approaching footsteps of Ginger and Ram.

  He said: “Dear me.”

  Damon raised the gun, sighting down the twin barrels, high on power, on brutality, on his own inner blackness. He was riding his madness like a wave crest, all restraint abandoned, surfing the flood tide of a glorious dark freedom. He could do anything—hurt, maim, kill—it didn’t matter anymore. There were no rules to hold him back, no whispering of conscience, no nudging of future guilt. In the shadows of his mind he fondly imagined the monster he had become was his true self.

  “Give me the cup,” he said. “I know you have it. Get it for me.”

  “Where’s the dog?” Ram quavered, from the rear. “I can’t see it.” He was looking around nervously.

  “Never mind the bloody dog,” Damon snapped. “If I see it, I’ll blow its head off. Stop whining.”

  “Ah, but you won’t see him,” Bartlemy said softly.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s behind you.”

  Damon spun around, but too late—the teeth had already closed on his calf. He tried to swing the gun—aim it—but it was no longer in his control. Bartlemy had seized the muzzle in a grip that did not belong to an old man and wrenched it effortlessly from his hands. Damon saw blood running from the dog’s jaws—his blood—and doubled over, grunting with pain. “You didn’t—warn me!” he accused Ram. “Stupid c—”

  “I didn’t see it!” Damon’s henchmen were retreating rapidly, into the house. “It came from nowhere!”

  “He does that,” Bartlemy acknowledged, shooing them negligently into his living room. And to Damon: “He has a very strong jaw. Don’t struggle: he could break your leg. The hyena’s bite is the most powerful in the dog world, but I assure you my friend here can match it. Possibly there is some hyena in him. Are you in pain?”

  Damon’s breath hissed in answer.

  “Good,” Bartlemy said tranquilly. “You need to feel pain. You need to know what it’s like to be on the receiving end. That is your first lesson.” The dog bit deeper, teeth touching bone. “Rukush! That will do. Where is Nathan?”

  “The woods…” Damon squeezed the words out. He was white and sweating.

  “He’s in the van!” Ram piped up. “We parked along a track about half a mile away. Damon made us tie him up, but it wasn’t our idea. None of it was our idea.”

  “But you went along with it, didn’t you?” Bartlemy said in the same gentle tone. “Very well, Rukush, go and find him. I can handle things here.”

  Hoover released the leg and sprang off through the trees. Damon crumpled where he stood.

  A short while later he found himself, like others before him, in Bartlemy’s living room. The gun was propped up against the wall, but no one made any move to retrieve it. Bartlemy had cut off the torn section of his trousers, bathed his wounds, and anointed them with a lotion that produced a sensation not unlike burning, for a minute or so. Damon screamed. As Bartlemy applied a bandage he said with an attempt at bravado: “My father will sue you.”

  “I don’t think so.” Bartlemy was unruffled.

  Ram and Ginger had obeyed the old man as if mesmerized, and now sat on the edge of the sofa, awaiting in suspense whatever might happen next. A newly developed instinct told them it might include cookies.

  When Hoover returned with Nathan—the dwarf had vanished back into the woods—there was more bathing and anointing, this time with a lotion that anesthetized pain. Nathan found himself looking at his late opponent (he didn’t count the other two) with a curious lack of hate. Damon sat brooding, hunched inside himself, a dark knot of bitterness and rage and suppressed misery. He’s hating enough for both of us, Nathan thought.

  Then there was tea, and cookies. Damon refused to eat.

  “I should if I were you,” Nathan said. “My uncle’s the best cook in the world.”

  He believed he was exaggerating a little, but it was true.

  “We ought to call your mother,” Bartlemy said. “She’s concerned about you. But she’ll bring the police, and I don’t want them quite yet.”

  To the three who thought of themselves as his prisoners, that sounded ominous.

  Bartlemy pulled up a stool in front of Damon, taking his face between both hands despite his resistance, forcing him to lift his head. “No, don’t turn away. Look at me. Look at me.” And then, as if to himself: “There’s something not right here.”

  Nathan was watching, but Ram and Ginger went on eating cookies. When they had emptied the plate, Bartlemy said: “You can go now.”

  They stared at him, pop-eyed.

  “I expect the police will come to see you in due course. You never know. Meanwhile, you’d better take your father back his van.” I never told him it was my father’s van, Ram thought. “You won’t be coming here again.”

  They shook their heads eagerly, then nodded.

  “You should hurry,” Bartlemy recommended. “The woods will be dark soon.”

  As if it grew dark in the woods before anywhere else, thought Ram, wishing he was as unimaginative as his companion. But even Ginger appeared unsettled as they walked back up the road and groped their way along the woodland track to where they had left the van. They found the doors open and the windshield shattered, and the undergrowth seemed to have crept nearer, and twitching shadows stalked the edge of their sight.

  “I don’t like this.” Ginger summed up the feelings of both. “I don’t like it at all. Let’s get outta here.”

  They brushed the broken glass off the seat, climbed in, and reversed hastily and awkwardly back to the road.

  At Thornyhill, Bartlemy told Nathan: “Call your mother on her cell. Tell her she can collect you from here in an hour, not before. She will want to bring the inspector—that’s fine—but not till nine thirty. Mind that: it’s important.”

  Nathan made the call.

  THE DAYLIGHT was fading as Bartlemy drew the curtains and lit the spellfire. The crystals split and crepitated in the heat; blue-white flames hissed over them, sending ghost-lights and shadows glancing around the room. Twice Damon rose as if to leave, but Hoover rose with him, not growling, not threatening, just there, shaggy and immovable, blocking his egress, and each time he sat down again. Occasionally he protested, “You can’t keep me here!”—but no one bothered to answer, and the objection sounded thin even to his own ears. Nathan, at a gesture from his uncle, took a chair well ou
t of the way and stayed there. He felt curious but also oddly uncomfortable, a witness to a scene that ought to be private, like an accidental eavesdropper who overhears a doctor telling a patient he is seriously ill. Bartlemy lit candles on either side of Damon, smelling of strange herbs; the scent made Nathan’s head feel fuzzy. At one point, Damon said: “Not more of this New Age witchcraft garbage. I don’t believe in all that shit.”

  More? Nathan wondered. More…

  He wanted to ask Bartlemy if Damon really was possessed, but sensed that this was not the time for talking.

  Bartlemy seated himself in front of the boy, murmuring something in Atlantean, the secret language of magic. Suddenly Damon became quiet and still. As the incantation continued his expression emptied, leaving him with the look of a sleepwalker, open-eyed and unseeing. Hoover, his guard duty no longer necessary, retreated to sit beside Nathan. He’s hypnotized, Nathan thought, except his uncle had made none of the moves of the conventional hypnotist. The pale firelight danced over the rug, showing an Oriental design of great complexity, patterns within patterns, glints of vermilion and ruby nestling within coils of beige and blue. Without ever really looking at it Nathan had been familiar with it all his life, but now he seemed to see different shapes flicking in and out of the pattern, runes older than the Orient, symbols of a civilization long gone. Perhaps it was a trick of the fire glow, but it was almost as if the design had shifted, mutating imperceptibly into new forms, new complexities. By chance or choice Damon’s chair was at the center of a circle; all the radiance of the candles appeared to be concentrated within it, illuminating Damon’s face very clearly. Not a cruel face, Nathan reflected, not now, just young and unmarked, cleansed of all feeling.

  Bartlemy placed his fingertips gently on the boy’s temples, still murmuring the soft cold words of the spell. If it was a spell. It sounded more like a kind of exhortation, a ripple of persuasive phrases insinuating themselves into the blankness of Damon’s mind. Presently Bartlemy began to pull his fingers away, and there was something black attached to them, apparently drawn out of Damon’s head, like long strands of clinging vapor that gradually disseminated in the candlelight. More of it came…and more…Nathan watched in fascinated horror as one great dark clot adhered to Bartlemy’s hand like an inky goo, though it seemed to have no more substance than mist.