by Pete Kahle
“You’re on the money there, honey pie,” said Ariadne.
She and Scathach and I were all exhausted, ready to slump down. Caliban had gone on ahead, swallowed by the coming night. We forced ourselves to walk for a while, but the first grove we came to we paused for a rest. Scathach sat some way apart from Ariadne and me, her head bowed, her body slumped. The battle had taken a lot more out of her. And were those tears staining her face?
I sat close to Ariadne on a fallen log and watched her as she cleaned muck off her twin blades with sheaves of grass.
“So what gives with Scathach?” I asked her softly. “She could have nailed him more than once.”
“Even you, Mr. Stone, must have noticed the air of sadness about the girl,” she said. “Hmm? A deep melancholy.”
“Sure. It’s like there’s two sides to her. The warrior and the maiden. Like two different people. She told me about the man she lost, Kulkain. It hurt her. Deep.”
“I’ve seen that hurt before, Nick. When you lose someone that special, you lose a lot of yourself as well,” Ariadne said pointedly.
She meant Martha, I knew that. I’d pushed all that deep down inside myself and although in the past I’d opened up a little to Ariadne, I hadn’t told her the full story. It was still like a knife in my gut. Sometime soon I was going to have to tell her all about it. Maybe that would be a way to pull that knife out of me.
“What happened to him - Kulkain?” she asked.
I told her something of what Scathach had said to me. As I was talking, the coin dropped in the slot and realisation hit me. I stared across at Scathach, whose eyes were closed. My guess was, she was reliving the confrontation with the Pumpkin King.
“Hell, so that was it. She said the dark powers had won Kulkain over. Absorbed him. So, back there –”
“The Pumpkin King was fighting himself. You heard that second voice. It’s why she couldn’t use the Gae Bolg to destroy him.”
“Kulkain was in there, part of him. Just as the Boneless Men absorb their victims, the King had absorbed Kulkain at some point. Only he still had enough humanity left in him to fight back. He saved us.”
“Right,” said Ariadne, her own face clouded.
It came to me then what it must have meant to Scathach. She would have been torn. I couldn’t think of anything more soul-destroying than that knowledge. And how had it ended back there? What had been the outcome of that lunatic contest?
Ariadne broke into my thoughts by kissing me gently.
“That’s for being noble,” she said, a smile returning.
“Ma’am, I was too freaked out to be noble.”
“Not at all. You could have taken the Pumpkin King up on his offer to swap you and me for Scathach. We could have walked free if you’d agreed. You would have been saving me. What could be more important to you? But of course, you were thinking of Scathach.”
“Wait a minute, lady, what are you getting at?”
“Nothing. She’s important to you, of course.” She gave me a look of pure mischief. I felt like a mouse surrounded by a bunch of cats.
“Hell, there’s no pleasing you dames.”
She laughed, unable to keep up her teasing. “Ah, but there is. And you did okay.”
Scathach had heard Ariadne’s laughter. She got up and came to us. “It’s over for now,” she said. “I won’t fall into that trap again.”
“We were all suckered in,” I told her. “Me, right from the start. But we know what we’re up against now. We need to go back home and think it through.”
She nodded. “I’ll say goodbye for the time being.” That was it. A last smile, then she was off into the darkness, following Caliban. I would have gone after her, said more, but Ariadne gently pulled me back.
“Private time,” she said. “Maybe she’ll talk to us later.”
I bowed to her judgement and after a few minutes we went back through the forest, barely able to see the way until we reached another grove where there was a small lantern hanging in a tree. Leaning on the narrow trunk was the hunched form of Scathach’s familiar, now in his gargoyle form.
Ariadne was taken aback for a moment, but I hailed the little man.
“You two want a light back to the lodge, or you planning on stumbling about in the dark until breakfast?” he grumbled.
“Yeah, we could do with some help. Lead on, MacDuff.”
“That’s lay on, bonehead.”
“And cursed be he who first calls hold, enough.”
“Would you two gentlemen stop bickering and get us back into the warm, please?” said Ariadne in a voice that even Caliban wasn’t going to ignore.
He took down the lantern and handed it up to me. “Say, you did a good job back there. Most guys woulda took the money and ran when it was offered. I thank you for not going down that road.”
“You’ll have me all emotional, you ugly runt.”
“It’s what’s inside that counts, Mr. Razorface. See you around.” He nodded to the bemused Ariadne and moments later was gone.
She stared at me. “Razorface?”
“We like to trade insults.”
“I don’t know, though. It sort of suits you.”
When we reached the grounds around the lodge, the whole place was cloaked in darkness, although a bright moon ducked in and out of the clouds and gave us a better view of the lawns. We reached the wide windows of one of the lounges and after a brief look around me, I set down the lantern and fumbled for the house keys, handing them to Ariadne.
“I made sure the place was locked when I left,” I told her. “I didn’t want the raccoons to get in and mess the place up.”
I waited while she chose a key and unlocked, sliding one long window aside. She flicked on an internal light switch and was about to enter, when something snagged her attention. She turned back to me. I was several feet away from her, looking up at the roof and generally checking the place over. It was still too quiet, even for night.
“Don’t move until I tell you,” she whispered and the air was so static I caught every word. I knew then that there was something behind me. Something of hostile intent that made my blood slow down and almost clog.
Ariadne had slipped her swords into her belt as we came here, but now she pulled one free, softly as a shadow. Her eyes indicated that I should move to my right, and fast. I suddenly flung myself that way, crash landing almost in the shrubs, just as she drew back her arm and threw the sword like it was an oversize throwing knife. I watched it turn end over end, silvered by the moonlight, hissing through the air.
Behind me, the blade chocked into something solid. I rolled out of the clinging vegetation, gun in hand, just about in time to see the last of the bodyguards, the seventh, stagger backwards, his head cloven in two, squirting whatever pink liquid served for blood over its chest. Ariadne was on the creature in a flash, using her other blade to finish the grisly work. Another bonfire to attend to.
I went to her and put an arm around her. “I knew my maths wasn’t wrong. Three died here and three died back in Pumpkinville. That left one. I’m getting slow. Should have remembered.”
“He would have shot to kill, Nick,” she said, with a shudder. “Rather than let us escape, this one was left here to kill us. As a last resort.”
I retrieved the lantern, took out its weird candle and applied it to the dead Boneless Man. In moments it had become a blazing torch and we stepped back from the blast of heat. She was right. And the others I’d shot here earlier had been easy kills. They’d been here to delay us, not finish us.
We went inside and both slumped into the plush seating, too bushed to say much for a while. My guess was, she’d be able to explain the missing seven bodyguards to the police. That was, if anyone asked about them. It went with the territory.
“Do you want me to see if I can rescue anything of that meal?” she said, tugging off her mask.
I nodded. “Either that or I’ll start eating the shrubbery.”
“Pour us both
a drink. Stiff ones.”
I didn’t need asking twice. “One good thing has come out of this mess,” I told her, with what might have passed for a wry grin. “You’ve lost all your pilots. Unless you’ve got a wagon stashed away in the garage, we’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”
“Not quite all,” she said, with a grin that sent a shiver down my spine. “I’m quite capable of flying a helicopter myself. I’m fully licenced.”
Yeah, well I should have known as much. “Is that so? No hurry, though. Let’s give it a week or two. Or more.”
She came over and put her arms around me. “I think we better get back to the city in the morning. This place isn’t a safe haven anymore.”
“Could we make that late morning?”
“Of course. As long as we’re back before closing time. I’ve some shopping to attend to.”
“Shopping?” I said it like it was one of the worst words in the dictionary. Let’s face it, I got that right.
“Yes. I need a new kitbag for a start. Given that a certain person left mine back there in the wilderness. Not to mention the sweet little dress that was in it.”
I tried to grin, but failed miserably. Dames and their clothes.
“Then in the evening, we can celebrate. After all, it will be Samhain.”
Adrian Cole began writing at the tender age of 10, although he wasn’t ready to submit professionally until he was much older – at 19. His first published work was a ghost story for IPC magazines in 1972, followed soon after by a trilogy of sword & planet novels, THE DREAM LORDS (Zebra, US) in the 1970s. Since then he has gone on to have more than 2 dozen novels published and many short stories and his work has been translated into a number of foreign editions.
He writes science fiction, heroic fantasy, sword & sorcery, horror, pulp fiction, Mythos and has had two young adult novels published, MOORSTONES and THE SLEEP OF GIANTS (Spindlewood, UK)
His best known works are the OMARAN SAGA and STAR REQUIEM quartets and these have also been published recently as ebooks under the Gollancz SF Gateway imprint and are also being released as audio books (Audible).
His most recent novel is THE SHADOW ACADEMY, sf from Edge (Canada). In October of 2015, he received the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Collection for NICK NIGHTMARE INVESTIGATES (Alchemy UK), the first arc of stories about his hard-boiled occult private eye who confronts the various minions of Lovecraft’s Mythos as well as other monsters and horrors in different, bizarre locales.
He has been nominated for numerous other awards, and has appeared in Year’s Best collections.
A native of Devon, UK, he lives in Bideford with his wife, Judy, and enjoys frequent dips in the sea and an occasional bike ride up into the forests of the local area, about which the less said, the better.
For more information, visit adriancscole.com
RESTY ACRES
By Beau Johnson
In the beginning I didn’t believe him; nor would you, all told. The tip-off should have been the coffee he brought me.
In the six years I had known Emil Dimpton, he had never given up anything to anyone free of charge. In his infinite wisdom (add sarcasm here), I think he thought that buying me my morning joe should have made me more inclined to believe his tail of fancy. He’d been wrong, of course, as I have already stated, but only for a while; in the end, but perhaps more so in the middle, I came to believe as much as he. God, I say, should help us all.
My name is Walter Meade and I am seventy-six years old. I am writing this because there needs to be an account of what went on here - what is going on here. As I did not believe Emil there at the beginning, no one has believed it coming from my mouth either. Of this I am sure and why I have chosen to detail it this way instead. No matter. It needs to be noted. It needs to get out. I will write and make copies and send them by mail. It will appear as though I am sick, the conclusions drawn unavoidable; that I will seem the senile old fart, sane but for a dementia which lurks. This is the risk I take. This how scared I am. With what life I have left, I wish to remain.
As you are aware, I am crippled. My light and legs lost to me long ago, each to the same event - the one which took my wife as well as my mobility. I live in this retirement home someone - some young upstart I’ve no doubt - decided to call Resty Acres. Some funny, huh? That name. Resty Acres. No, not really. Kind of sad, actually, when you really sit and ponder it. It is a nice enough place, very quiet, very clean, consisting of a menu which still finds ways to surprise me.
Also, I have yet to be beaten since my eldest dropped me here some eight years ago. And just so we’re clear - I don’t hold it against you, Barry, for leaving me here like you did. You are the oldest, the responsibility fell to you. If it were me in your shoes I would have done the same. Not only because I had become a burden, but because you have your own to take care of now. I am old now, yes, what more could one such as me have to offer someone like you? Just because I brought you in this world, fed you and clothed you, nurtured and guided you, ensured you received your schooling and then your doctoring, what would I deserve in return? Nothing. As you’ve given, son - as you’ve given. I wish you well, boy. As I do your brothers and sisters.
Pricks. The lot of you. Am I bitter? Little bit.
Back to it then.
It was a Tuesday when Emil came to me with the free cup of joe and right from the get-go you could tell that something was off, that the man was struggling; some unseen weight seemed to be pulling at his corners, the ones which keep the majority of us in check. For an old codger awaiting his last day he was an unusually upbeat fellow is what I mean to say, but he was far from that on this particular day. No, this day Emil was scared. I would go so far as to say terrified even. His color was off as well, his face almost ashen except for these dark circles which hung beneath his eyes like two used tea bags---the round kind, not the square. He kept wiping his head too, with that damn handkerchief of his, which would have been much weirder if the old boy still had hair. Slowly, he explained what had happened as best he could. Done, he pleaded with me to believe him, that he didn’t think anyone one else would. I agreed with him, as it was poppycock, what he told me, but balderdash was the word I think I used to explain it to him.
“But Walter, it took Vera! I don’t want to be next.”
“And you won’t be,” I said, more than a little patronizingly. “Emil: if what you say is true, then size will prove your friend; it makes you too big for it to take you. Besides, how do you know Vera hasn’t had one of her episodes and only went wandering, as she’s been known to do? You don’t. Therefore until she turns up, you cannot know. Not for sure.”
He looked at me then, and I could tell his confusion remained, thicker now than when he first sat down. This had not been my intent.
Around and around his handkerchief went, damn thing wiping whatever it needed to wipe. He said: “But I am losing weight every week, Walter. I am only above one hundred and twenty as of this morning. I am very close to the pattern weight I think.”
“Emil, seriously; we are too old to believe in things such as these. There are no vampires, especially ones which eat entire victims. When have you ever heard of a vampire doing that? How would it be possible even? Is it not only for the jugular, the drinking of and what not?”
“Do not patronize me, Walter!” And there was real anger there, a flash of it anyway. “Three of us have gone missing in the last two years, four now with Vera. All unaccounted for. Off wandering they say, always in the middle of the night, all of it conveniently blamed on senility of course. Do you think I have not thought this through? Do you not think I have seen?”
“Emil, you yourself said it was dark when you saw and that you couldn’t really see.”
“But the noises I heard!”
“Yes. But hadn’t those awakened you? Is it possib--
But it was too late. He was up and gone without so much a glance back towards me, that damn handkerchief searching for something, searching as always. It
was only later that I realized I hadn’t even popped the lid to the coffee Emil had tried to bribe me with. I’m sure if some shrink thought hard enough they would be able to form some sort of correlation between this and what was about to happen.
Yes, quite sure.
I didn’t see Emil much after that morning and the times that I did he did not look much better than when he first told me about the vampire he believed was hidden amongst the elderly here at Resty Acres; his appearance seemed to be on the decline, deteriorating little by little each time I saw him in the weeks which followed. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but there actually came a time when he chose to no longer dress himself. Moreover, his hygiene was beginning to suffer as well. Ultimately, he ended up wearing nothing more than underpants and that housecoat of his, the one with black stripes. He still had his handkerchief, however, that same old red one, although it seemed to be getting less and less work the more times I saw him; mostly I would see it dangling from his hand, limp as his new demeanour. It was when Emil himself went missing that things began to change for me. Or rearrange, if I am to be truthful.
When the talk Emil and I had on that Tuesday morning was given new perspective.
I am very close to the pattern weight, I think.
That is what he said, there at our table in the breakfast room. Odd, yes, but as I think back over the times I saw him wandering to and fro in that housecoat of his, it occurs to me that Emil did seem to be on the decline in weight as well. The man was becoming less is what I mean to say, smaller and thinner each time I took notice I suppose.
Still, thinking back, maybe I could have prevented some of this; maybe, maybe not. At least I could have put forth an effort, which is something I did not do, not then. And of this I am ashamed, just so you know, as it places my character beneath a light I am unfamiliar with.
Before all that, however, I received my new roommate. His name was Stanley Chesterfield, and if that name isn’t a handle then I don’t know what is. I called him Flat Stan on account of his face, which really needs no further explanation. He was a smaller man, and frail, from years of bed rest I’m sure. He was also uncommunicative. Not totally, but unable to hold a conversation concerning the here, the present and the now; poor Flat Stan had come to be my roomy while he found himself trapped within the end stages of Alzheimer’s.
