by Frank Tuttle
She waited as long as she could before blinking. I grinned.
“Mr. Needy remarried. Got work unloading lumber boats. Ordered his hats and clothes from Rannit. One fine summer day, he was walking in the shade under some cypress trees being thinned for timber. One fell the wrong way, but this time, Mrs. Krait, Mr. Needy’s luck ran out. The blow broke him up inside. He was on his deathbed when I found him. Didn’t live long enough to read the letter his first wife sent.” I held up the blade, turned it in the lamplight. “That’s the problem with second chances,” I said. “They’re wasted, if you keep making the same damn fool mistakes.”
Darla and Gertriss came in, loaded down with kite-parts. “We’re done,” Darla said. She frowned up at the hole in the roof. “Guess we can put it together down here, then push it through and launch it,” she said.
I nodded, not taking my eyes off the widow. “Evis said he’d bang on the roof when he was done with the line spool,” I said. “He ought to be getting close by now.”
Darla saw my knife. She looked to Mrs. Krait. “Are we having a problem?” she asked, no humor in her tone.
“Not yet,” I said. I gave the blade a good long pass with the whetstone. “But soon, I think. Real soon now.”
“I shall enjoy watching each of you die,” said Mrs. Krait. She finally looked my way. “Especially you, you peasant.”
Darla crossed the space between herself and the widow in two long strides.
“No one wearing those clothes has any business citing old-world class distinctions,” she said, her face inches from the widow’s. “Now, my husband might be reluctant to feed widows to monsters, but I’m a modern woman, free of such traditional restraints. Dear, do we really need this wretched creature any longer?”
“Her? No. Her knowledge? Maybe.” I rose. “You’re on your own, Mrs. Krait. I tried to talk sense to you. Guess I’m forced to acknowledge I’m many years too late.”
Evis knocked on the roof. He shouted something, too, but the whipping wind of our passage snatched his words away.
I put my knife away. Put my whetstone back in my pocket.
“Let’s get the kite together,” I said. “Gertriss. Watch our guest.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Jiggles helped. Each of his exhaled breaths was a thing of horror, his body odor the stuff of legend. But his hands were surprisingly steady and he knew a few knots I’d never mastered.
It didn’t take quite an hour. When we were done, we had a full-sized signal kite ready to stuff through the hole in the roof.
The Army kites I remembered always had one brown box and one white one. Ours had two box frames, true, but the skin was red and blue and yellow and green, every color of the rainbow. Darla had also managed to work a long red feather boa into the tail, giving the contrivance the appearance of a flamboyant if somewhat rectangular peacock.
“It’s a thing of rare beauty,” offered Jiggles, before taking a long swig from his flask.
“It’s time to get it aloft,” said Evis, whose head stuck down through the opening. “We’ve got company. Looks like the wand-waver brought friends.”
I moved to a window, peeped out through the shade.
Behind us, but gaining ground, a pair of ungainly giants galloped in pursuit, flanking and outpacing the dancing spark that I knew to be the Playful.
Each was naked. Each bore a single baleful eye, and a club the size of a Park blood oak.
I let the shade fall. “I’m going up,” I said, climbing atop the makeshift scaffold. “Gertriss. She moves, you know what to do.”
Gertriss nodded.
I clambered up into the night, which became a flickering semblance of day before I managed to stand.
The kite’s first box came lumbering up after me. I grabbed it, losing my hat in the process. Evis helped, and it took both of us to haul the kite out without being swept aloft ourselves.
Evis, sure-footed as a tomcat, maneuvered the kite’s clumsy frame into the stand we’d constructed earlier.
“I’ll get the line and tie it off,” shouted Evis. He looked toward the giants, who bellowed and waved their clubs and generally displayed an appalling disregard for their lack of pants. “Hope this works,” he added.
“Me too.” I put myself behind the spool-winch, took hold of the lever that would release it, grasped the crude clutch that should allow me to play out the line slowly until the kite started climbing on her own.
“Ready,” yelled Evis. The wind whipped at his long black coat, made a mess of his brand new hair.
“Here goes,” I said, and I hauled back on the clutch as I pushed the locking lever out of place.
Evis kicked the frame supports away, and our peacock of a signal kite filled herself with rushing wind and hurtled skyward.
I let out a hundred feet of line so fast it smoked going over the frame. The kite turned and righted itself and took a single shallow agonizing dip, but then her tail flew back straight and her boxes went level and she soared up and up and up, eagerly pulling more and more line, taking quickly toward the unsettled sky.
Evis jumped and hollered like the ten-year-old kid he might once have been. Darla stuck her head up the opening and saw and she cheered, and I heard the cheer repeated from below.
The giants howled, flailing their clubs at our kite, but they were too late and she was too high and I laughed as they leaped and roared.
I farmed out more line, hauling on the clutch whenever the kite dipped or sank, letting it have all it wanted those times it climbed. We’d estimated our line at ten thousand feet, more or less.
It took a few minutes, but soon the spool of line shrank, showing the markings we’d placed at the halfway point.
Five thousand feet of line. I squinted at the now-tiny kite, tried to guess its height against a sky that refused to stand still.
“How high?” shouted Evis.
“Couple of thousand feet,” I said. The giants were gaining, so close now each of their ungainly footfalls sounded with the crack-crack-crack of distant cannon fire. I watched them, but neither of their baleful single eyes was turned skyward, and I doubted they could even see the line against the furious sky.
The tension on the line was increasing gradually. The kite stopped dropping, instead ascending quickly, as though borne aloft on some invisible current of air.
Evis saw, and hooted, and in the space of a quarter-hour I played out every last inch of line.
The kite was just a speck, when we could see it at all.
I locked the spool clutch down.
Evis joined me, pistol in one hand, long silver knife in the other. He kept his eyes on the opening.
I reached into my pocket, found the package holding the two golden keys. They were sewn into a felt bag, along with a hoop-shaped steel catch and a long red silk tail.
“Don’t stop for anything,” I said. I hooked the catch around the kite line, made damned sure I’d fastened it correctly, and let the bag’s crimson tail unfurl and catch the rushing wind.
Then I let go.
The bag and the keys shot out of my hand, rising along the kite-line, heading up so fast I had time to blink just twice before they were gone.
The giants kept coming. The Playful, too, dancing and darting, no more a mere spark in the distance. The sky kept flashing and changing and raging.
“Did it work?” Evis asked, not looking up.
“We’ll know soon,” I replied. I lashed the clutch lever in place with a scrap of rope, kicked the spool’s winding handle away. It spun off into the dark.
“That’s that,” Evis said. “We’d better wait it out below.”
I nodded. Evis simply dropped through the opening, ignoring the scaffold. I climbed carefully down, as befits a gentleman, and shut the hole behind me.
Evis was already reporting the kite’s successful deployment. I was sure only Darla and the widow understood the arcane mechanics of our scheme, but all those assembled—and it was everyone save the train cre
w—smiled hopeful smiles and exchanged hopeful words.
Everyone, that is, save Mrs. Krait.
She glared.
Had I not been listening for it, I’m sure I would have missed the telltale scrape of little red cloven hooves tip-toeing across the top of the bar car, heading right for the line spool.
I didn’t bother firing at her. Even bereft of her murder bag, I figured she had at least a temporary defense against our weapons.
“Evis,” I said, and that was all I had to say, because he flew at her, vampire-quick and Avalante ruthless.
He buried that silver knife in her chest, gave it a savage twist. That got her attention. She stood, flung Evis aside, and tried to snatch the blade away.
It wouldn’t budge. Evis rose and I recognized the grin. “Binding dagger,” he shouted.
“Cheap pine,” I replied. I picked up a chair and broke it over the widow’s glaring head.
She snarled. Darla opened fire, and Darla doesn’t miss, not from two steps away. Holes appeared in the widow’s forehead, sealed over before they bled.
Gertriss’s scattergun belched fire. Mrs. Krait’s abdomen shrank, but she leaped, hands curled into claws, at my face.
I sidestepped, batted her away. Gertriss gave her the second barrel, right in her ass, and that sent her flailing and rolling toward Jiggles.
The clown spat rotgut whiskey in her eyes, stomped her neck with a steel-toed clown shoe, and then went down himself at a single blow from the howling sorceress.
I lunged, knife in hand. She dodged and went down on all fours and climbed the car’s wall like a skirt-wearing spider.
Jiggles, rose, leaped, caught himself a foot. It came off in his hand as Mrs. Krait shed skin like a snake. The other passengers either huddled beneath the nearest table or hurled whatever was handy at the sorceress, who ignored every blow as she reached the ceiling.
A third coal-black eye emerged from her forehead. Her fingers turned long, her nails grew into talons. Short black bristles, too thick and stiff to be hair or fur, sprouted from her pale skin.
“Mrs. Krait. Look here,” shouted Darla, as a mob formed at the car’s forward exit. Darla snatched up one of Mrs. Krait’s long black wands and broke it in half.
The widow-thing howled. Her legs twitched and she fell, landing in a spasming heap. Gertriss unloaded her scattergun again, flattening the widow briefly to the floor. Gertriss flailed away with the butt of the scattergun when the widow gathered her spindly limbs to rise.
“That must have been painful,” Darla said, taking the second black wand in her hands.
“Bet this hurts, too.”
She snapped it in half.
The widow let loose a cry so ragged and loud she tore her vocal cords after the first awful moment of it. Her skin crawled visibly across bones that shifted and changed inside her. When Darla broke the third wand, the changes came faster, but they lost the symmetry they’d had, as though becoming random and undirected.
The widow screamed again, biting half her tongue off when her jaw changed abruptly.
My Army knife found its way into my hand. I hadn’t quite had time to stab the widow when every window on both sides shattered inward, and scores of mad-eyed red imps poured in, grabbing and leaping and clawing.
Killins got the door open. The next car was clear, so he started kicking the red devils mobbing him back, letting the others rush into the sleeper car. Only Jiggles and Miss Hasty remained, despite Killins’s imprecation to flee. Instead, Miss Hasty picked up a broken chair-leg and was immediately bowled over by a pair of gibbering imps.
Killins waded in, bellowing, snatching them up and hurling them aside as he made a beeline for the beleaguered Miss Hasty. Devils flew. Jiggles opted to grab imp-heads and knock them together. The devils surrounded us. Darla took down a dozen with as many shots, Gertriss plowed a brief path with her blunderbuss, and Evis dealt out vampire mayhem as fast as his clever hands could stab.
Still, they came, wave after wave, score after score. We put our backs to the door as the bar car filled with imps, until they were a few steps from forcing us out.
“Get that door locked,” I yelled, to Killins. He managed to drag Miss Hasty out of a pile of imps, and set about securing the door.
“One’s up top, after the keys,” Evis yelled. He grabbed hold of a particularly large imp and twisted its head all the way around before throwing it at its fellows. “Want I should go after?”
“Too late,” I yelled. I didn’t need to pop my head up to see that a smallish imp could easily climb the kite line all the way up, and then scamper back down with the keys. “Just make sure she doesn’t get them.”
The imps crowded in, clawing and shrieking. I lost my coat. Evis was perilously close to appearing in public without his trademark black cravat. Gertriss was untouched, flailing away expertly with her sturdy scattergun, unable to stop and reload but clubbing skulls with admirable ease all the same.
Darla put her back to mine. She held up the finger-bones from the widow’s bag. “Were these things you needed?” she yelled, over the din. Then she dropped them on the floor and ground them to splinters with her heel.
The widow climbed the wall, hissing. She left behind a trail of thick dark blood and glared at us with eyes gone spider-black and bug-shiny. When she opened her mouth, her teeth spewed out, replaced by bristly fangs that dripped yellow venom.
Darla twisted open a vial and threw it toward the widow’s nightmare face.
Maybe the widow recognized the vial and knew what was coming. She bunched her limbs and tried to skitter away, but the vial struck her shoulder, and when it did, the bar car lit up like the inside of a cannon.
My eyes swam with bright spots. The blast deafened me. Deafened us all. Blew a hole in the train car, blew the widow’s left forelimb off. Even the imps grabbed at their ears and stopped clawing at us long enough for me to drop a pair of them and wound half a dozen more.
I waded through them, toward the widow, but got there just as she climbed through the hole and out into the dark.
Evis rushed past me. He managed to grab her blouse, but it tore away, and she crawled back toward the luggage car until she vanished in a sudden fall of midnight.
“Damn, damn, damn,” said Darla. She opened fire on the interior wall of the car, emptying her revolvers along the line the widow might be crawling. All we heard was a snatch of hoarse laughter, and the steady tread of the approaching giants.
The widow’s severed limb, arm or leg no more, twitched and rolled. Jiggles picked it up and hurled it through the hole. I did the same with a trio of imps before they turned on us again.
Killins yanked an imp off my back and smashed it against the wall. Miss Hasty squeezed her eyes shut and stabbed the sharp end of her chair leg through the imp’s skinny throat.
Darla’s expression hardened, the way it always does when someone mentions Dasher in a disparaging tone before asking when we’re going to buy a real house. She clubbed an imp with her revolver, kicked another out the hole, and broke a third one’s neck over the back of a chair.
The count of imps dwindled. I caught sight of a few pricking up their nasty little ears before scampering away, as though responding to an urgent call.
We fought on. The remaining devils died or fled. Evis lost his cravat, but none of us appeared to have suffered any mortal wounds.
“Dammit,” spat Darla. “She’s loose. My fault.”
“She’s not going far,” I said. I gave the last imp a kick.
Screams rose up from behind the locked door to the first sleeper car.
“What now?” bellowed Killins. He was huffing and puffing and he looked a little mad. Miss Hasty hefted her bloody stick, not a bit of anything prim remaining in her eyes.
“It probably ain’t dancing girls,” said Jiggles, and we bolted for the door all at once.
Evis kicked it in.
The sleeper car was filled with Angels.
Not the paper ones from before. No,
these were bright and shining Angels, each tall and fair. Each bore a gleaming sword.
Each had a passenger pinned to the corridor wall. The tip of every sword was held against a throat or poised to stab a heart.
The Dames held hands. They were the only ones not begging. I distinctly heard Dame Fabbers suggest the Angel before her was a “cheap bleached bitch of a whorehouse toilet spook.”
“I have the keys,” spoke the Angels in unison, in the widow’s own voice. “I told you I would enjoy watching you die.”
More Angels appeared, striding toward us.
“One for each of you,” spake the Angels. “You die last, peasant.”
“You don’t listen, do you?” I said. “More penny-dreadful melodrama. You don’t have time for all this, Mrs. Krait. I suggest you take a quick look at the sky.”
The Angels didn’t slow their approach, but the widow didn’t speak, either.
The flashes beyond the windows were decreasing in frequency.
“It worked,” I said. The Angel heading my way got a bullet to its face. It flinched, but didn’t miss a step. “The loci has shifted. The bubble is collapsing. Which means the Playful is a lot closer than she was when we started talking. Look for yourself. Tell me I’m wrong.”
My Angel missed a step. I grinned.
“So what’s it going to be, wand-waver? You really going to risk letting Merry get her hands on you, just so you can finish out this bit of bad theatre?”
“Die,” spoke my Angel as it halted before me. It raised its blade for a killing blow.
“Ladies first,” I said, and Darla opened another vial and splashed it in the Angel’s perfect face.
Its blade flashed. I brought up my knife, met it. Sparks flew.
The false Angel’s face melted away. It screamed with the widow’s voice and I kicked it in its holy groin and when it doubled over, Evis launched himself at it, his own knife rising and falling too quick for my eyes to follow.
The Dames shrieked and rushed their Angels. I saw Dame Fabbers go down, saw Dame Corniss sink her teeth into an Angel’s throat. The embalming fluid salesman managed to wrench a sword free and strike a bright figure down before he himself fell, a blade in his back.
