The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Don’t you worry, Miss Aoife,” Dean said as he slid his hand under my jumper, under my blouse, and pressed the cloth against my torn skin. “I’m thinking only the purest of thoughts.”

  The pressure of his hand triggered a fresh wave of pain-fueled giddiness. I danced on air, the world a painting that melted off its canvas before my eyes. Looking through the shoggoth’s eyes had been real, too real and too visceral to escape, but this felt like a dream, the kind I lied to Dr. Portnoy about, and I panicked, thrashing against Dean’s touch. I just wanted the pain to stop.

  “Hey.” Dean snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Stay with me, Aoife. Still and steady, and you’ll be right as rain.”

  “Is she …” Cal’s words twisted down a long and cavernous passage to my ears. “Is she … viral? If she changes …”

  “I’m not …” My tongue was thick, and speaking made my head pound, but I found the swirling, twirling giddiness of the necrovirus waited for me whenever I shut my eyes, so I forced them open. “I’m not …” I’m not infected. I’m not mad.

  “She’s in a bad way.” Dean peeled back my eyelid and brushed his fingers down my neck to where my carotid pulse throbbed. “It took a piece of her. This bleeding ain’t stopping on its own.”

  “Wh-what do I do?” Cal was a pale column of blond and khaki uniform at the edge of my vision.

  Dean’s hand slid under my shoulders and his opposite arm wrapped around my knees. The ground fell away and I turned my face into his T-shirt to avoid the waterfall of nausea that swamped me.

  “What do I do?” Cal’s shout cracked through the still air.

  “Keep up,” Dean said, and started to run. Our route pitched upward, and I felt cold wind on my face cut with low, hot throbs from my shoulder as Dean carried me. I tried not to cry, unsuccessfully. The tears just turned me colder as we climbed higher and higher up the mountainside, and I shivered, my teeth grating. There were things roaming in the night, glass-girls with fingers of ice and teeth of gales that stole your blood and breath and made it so you were never warm again.

  I felt them pulling icicle fingers through my hair and heard them whispering their poetry of cold, eternal sleep until I mercifully lost consciousness.

  Poison Blood

  WHEN I CAME awake again, I was lying on something lumpy and not altogether soft, while the crisp air teased my bare skin from neck to … I flushed, trying to yank the tatters of my blouse together. The last thing I wanted was to be like Stephanie Falacci, the girl Cecelia and her friends had teased mercilessly for still wearing camisoles and long underwear. My brassiere, washed so many times it had gone gray, wasn’t any better.

  “Easy!” Dean’s voice came in as I thrashed. “Easy, kiddo! You have to stay still while I clean this wound.”

  Everything was out of focus—I felt like I still had a hundred eyes, was still connected to the shoggoth.

  Cal’s voice piped in, like I was scanning channels in the aether. “Is she going to die?”

  “Not if you shut up so I can stop this poison from pumping all through her,” Dean snapped. His jacket creaked, and I saw him draw out a flat silver bottle.

  Dean unscrewed the cap, took a quick swig and then poised the flask over me. “You have to stay still, Aoife. No matter how much it hurts. You receiving me?”

  “You smoke.…” Talking, I sounded as drugged as any of the violent patients in Nerissa’s ward. I felt twice as looped. My words bled together, and my tongue was too fat for my mouth. “You drink.… Is there anything you don’t do, Mr. Harrison?” I heard giggling, and realized it was me.

  “I was never much good in a beauty contest,” Dean said shortly. “Cal, hold her shoulders.”

  “I’m not getting that close,” Cal said. The gold streak of his head shook vigorously. “If her blood gets on me—”

  “Listen up.” Dean’s voice had gone low and hard as the grinding gears of the Proctor’s ravens. “Either she’s your friend and you’re gonna help her survive long enough to get help, or you really are a yellow little bug-eyed worm and you can walk away right now.”

  “You don’t understand!” Cal cried. “The blood … it’s just so—”

  He let out a yelp as Dean yanked him down. Cal’s impact didn’t make any sound, and I identified the substance under us as moldy hay, the patchwork of sky and dark above as a rotting roof.

  “Hold her,” Dean said again. “If she thrashes, she’s just gonna bleed more.”

  With that, he tipped the flask over the shoggoth’s bite. The pain that came was so fast and hot, I thought for a moment that I was back in Lovecraft, that I’d been caught on the way to Arkham, and that my bare body was strapped into the castigator.

  I shrieked and bucked against Cal’s grip. “All right,” Dean said. “All right, it’s sterilizing your wound. Stopping the poison from spreading any further into you.”

  I didn’t care if I was on fire and it was water, I just wanted the pain to stop. I’d had wounds cauterized before, during machine shop classes, but this was worse. It was worse than anything, it was like ice had frozen my veins, was killing me by inches as it reached fingers to my heart.…

  “Is she going to go viral?” Cal demanded again, as I collapsed back onto the hay. “Is she going to change?”

  My sight and hearing faded in and out, and more than anything I wanted to plunge back into that dreamlike floating world that the shoggoth’s venom had shown me. At least there, I didn’t hurt.

  “I look like a damn surgeon to you, cowboy?” Dean snarled. “I don’t friggin’ know.”

  Cal let go of me and backed away. “I just thought … you seem like you have experience with virals. Creatures and stuff.”

  Dean snorted. “I steer clear of ’em same as any starched-up Academy boy would. I do want to live until I’m twenty.”

  Cal started to say something else, but I lurched to the side as I felt my last meal come up. There wasn’t much, just some bile, but I retched until I felt the muscles in my back spasm.

  Dean tucked my hair back under my collar until I collapsed into a sweating, shivering heap on the hay once more. “There,” he said. “Yakking’s a good sign. That’s your body trying to get the virus out.”

  I didn’t tell him it was already far too late—that a dormant strain of necrovirus had lain in my blood since I was born, and that in a few weeks it would give birth itself, with merciless swiftness, and eat my sanity alive. In a lucid state, I could lie to myself, but not now.

  Dean’s arms went around me and I was lifted again. This time vertigo caused a giddy drop in my empty stomach, and my head echoed as he pulled me tight against his chest.

  “If she’s sicking up she might have a chance,” Dean told Cal. “We gotta get her up to that house. Get the bleeding stopped. She can sweat it out if we give her proper care.”

  “You sure know a lot about the necrovirus.” Cal’s voice made me cold again, even as Dean’s proximity sent fingers of heat lighting across my skin, like when you go outside in a snowstorm without gloves. Dean felt like frostbite.

  As he carried me up the path to the mansion, I lost myself again in the sensations the venom brought over me, my skin sensitive enough that even the scratch of my uniform stockings was a small agony.

  “Make it stop,” I begged Dean. He pressed me against his chest as his footsteps bounced us up a steep trail. Bare trees laced their branches over our heads, forming a bony canopy that blurred under my sight until it became actual bones, an army of fingers and hands covered in weeping flesh and a tattered shroud reaching for me.

  I moaned and pressed my face against Dean’s chest. The nearer to him I stayed, the less it hurt.

  “Hang on, Aoife,” Cal said. His voice was like needles through Dean’s comfort. “Hang on, we’re almost there.”

  “No …,” I moaned, and clutched at Dean’s shirt. I had fire in my blood, poison burning me inside like oil on the Erebus. “No more, I can’t do it.…”

  “Yes, you can,
” Dean panted. “You can, Aoife. Just a few minutes more.”

  He squeezed me tighter, and in that way I managed to keep myself from crying out again as we climbed, slowly, through the mist and toward the dawn.

  Graystone

  I SAW GRAYSTONE for the first time through a dream haze, that gray drifting place between dreaming and waking.

  Mist parted, running fingers down the pitted bars of a pair of iron gates. Rock walls crawling with moss closed the estate off from the outside world, and a crow atop a copper finial stained green with corrosion opened its beak and let out a dry caw.

  The house itself sat at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Miskatonic Valley and the huddled, sleeping village of Arkham. The glowering mansion gave the impression of digging claws into the granite skin of the mountain, eyes of thick blue leaded glass staring down from pitch gables and finger-thin twin turrets, unblinking.

  Graystone was a house of bones. Its black spires reached skyward from a swaybacked slate roof. Garrets and warrens of rooms spilled away from the four-chambered brick heart, the cross-shaped center of the house crawling with moss and vines that spelled out sigils and signs before my feverish eyes. Aluminum flashing and guttering gleamed like mercury veins in the dawn.

  I moaned. Looking at Graystone was to look on something old and sleeping, and when it woke I feared it would be monstrously hungry.

  “Get the door open,” Dean ordered, and I heard Cal’s limping walk on the gravel of the front drive.

  “We shouldn’t just be breaking in like this,” he murmured. “Mr. Grayson would be within his rights to shoot us.”

  “Listen, cowboy. I ain’t lost a customer yet and I’m not gonna start with one as pretty as Miss Aoife here. She needs a bed, bandages, and maybe a shot of whiskey, since I’m dry. Now can you gimp yourself up those steps and open me a door, or can you just flap your gums?”

  “You know, I might be more of a pal if you’d quit ordering me around like we’re in some war serial,” Cal grumbled. “For a criminal, you’re real bossy.”

  “What I am is her guide and my guiding ain’t done until I deliver my clients to their threshold,” Dean said. “And since Miss Aoife is the one paying me, I’ll order anyone else I damn well please.”

  The crow followed us, landing on the brass Moorish lamp over the massive front doors. It hopped on skinny bird legs and its throat pulsed. Caw caw caw.

  “Door’s open.” Cal’s voice went faint with shock. “Shouldn’t it … not be open?”

  I watched the crow. I could see every feather on its body, every reflection in its black bead of an eye. The fever in me racked my bones with a violent cough as the bird stared.

  “Let your clutch out, then, and go find Aoife a bed,” Dean said. “She needs to sweat out this foulness.”

  Cal caught sight of the crow and shuddered. “Grim thing. I hate those nasty carrion birds.” He snatched stone from the iron planters flanking the front door, but Dean’s free hand shot out and knocked the stone back to the ground. “Bad, bad luck to harm a crow. He’ll run back to his witch and tell her all about you, you throw that stone.”

  “They eat the dead,” Cal said. “It just wants Aoife.”

  I tried to tell him I wasn’t dead yet, but I was shivering too violently. Dean’s fingers flexed, leaving deep marks in my flesh as he struggled to hold me. “That old boy’s just curious,” he told Cal. He tipped his head at the black bird above us. “Howdy, battle singer. We don’t mean any harm.”

  The crow stretched its wings, lava-glass beak snapping. It regarded Dean for a moment, then shifted its gaze to me, and to Cal, who sneered at it, making a shooing motion with his hands.

  Fluffing its wings in what I’d call irritation, the crow took flight, gliding over the iron-strapped walls and dipping into the valley like a spot of living ink on a vast misty page.

  My memory went soft then, like a needle slipping off a phonograph groove. Next I knew, I’d left the hard surety of Dean’s arms for a feather bed that smelled like lavender and must, and I wandered through hell and ice as the fever wrung itself out of my flesh and my dreams. The dreams were black, twisting, and tasted of metal. I touched what Nerissa touched—diamond-edged shrieking clarity that let me see everything too bright, too sharp. The madness that let me see the magic she imagined wreathed our ordinary world.

  In the fever dream, Dean was a blur, like a smudge of soot against clean skin. Cal floated bloodred and gold around the edges of my sight. The house, Graystone, whispered to me with a voice made of dry rot and dust, in the language of houses, all pops and creaks.

  At last, it lulled me into the sleep beyond dreaming, the sleep in a dead space where there’s nothing but weary emptiness. I anchored myself there and would have gladly stayed for centuries.

  When I woke again, I was disoriented. Night had thrown a velvet mask over the windows of the bedroom. Dean dozed in an overstuffed chair next to the bed, a pinup magazine much worn at the edges folded open on his chest.

  “Cal?” I whispered. He was nowhere to be seen. Dean’s breath hitched, but he didn’t wake.

  I swung my feet over the edge of the high bed, carved with animal heads for each post. The heads had enormous ears, bulbous eyes, fangs. Nothing from a natural history book.

  Setting my feet on the itchy Persian carpet, I tested my balance. Every bit of me ached, as if I’d turned all the gears of the Lovecraft Engine by hand, but I was solid as the rock we’d climbed to reach Graystone, no longer plagued by dizzying illusion.

  “Dean?” He shifted in his sleep, laying his head against the chair. A lock of hair escaped its comb tracks and snaked into his eye. I reached out to brush it away, got close enough to feel the warmth of his skin, and then pulled back. He’d just wake up, and I’d have to explain why I was out of bed. And thank him for saving my life, and admit that now I owed him something more than a fee. I hadn’t owed anyone except Conrad a thing in my life, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  From below, a great ticking like a heartbeat echoed. I was thirsty and still half asleep, but I was sure the sound hadn’t been there a moment ago. My mind wasn’t playing tricks on me any longer—I was myself, clear and focused. The sound was real.

  This was my father’s home, even if he hadn’t yet made an appearance. I was uninvited. Wandering about was for sneak-thieves and vagabonds, not respectable girls. Not for daughters.

  I chewed on my lip, thinking, then picked up the oil lamp guttering by the bedside, its small flame throwing spook shadows across the velvet damask curtains and the water-spotted wall panels. At second glance, everything about the room was rotten at the edges, from the moth-chewed carpet to the notes uttered by the warped floorboards under my feet.

  Glancing back once to make sure Dean hadn’t come awake after all to stop my exploration, I slipped out the high narrow door into a high narrow hall and followed the sonorous heartbeat of Graystone toward its source.

  A Clockwork Heart

  MY CREEPING FOOTSTEPS kept time with the invisible pendulum. The lamp in my hand gave off a buttery glow, older and more secretive than the crisp blue of aether globes.

  Graystone sprawled like a spiderweb, and the hallway twisted and turned back on itself. Soon enough, I was walking an unfamiliar hall and could only go forward until I reached a landing. The sound came from below me, in the empty space where the stairs and their threadbare carpet vanished into shadow.

  Nobody showed themselves. The dust floated in the lamplight like ghostly fireflies, and my only companion was the sound.

  I descended the stairs and found myself in a back hallway, which in turn lead to a back parlor. All of Graystone’s furniture sat swathed in dust catchers, lion feet peeking out from under their white skirts. The only uncovered thing in the room was an old-style wireless box, its aether tubes cloudy and dim with disuse.

  I left the parlor and found another faceless hallway, where portraits of Graysons past watched me with dour frowns, cobwebs trailing from their frames. I stopp
ed and raised the lamp, gazing at each face in turn, trying to find some clue to myself. There were precious few who looked anything like me among the starched clothes and serious eyes. The mossy green color of those eyes, though, was the same as mine. I turned away and tried a few doors, iron handles cold to my touch. Each was locked, and I left them that way. I wasn’t a sneak, but my father didn’t know that. I could only imagine being caught breaking into Graystone and snooping around. I wanted him to meet me on good terms, and approve of me, and nod in acknowledgment that I was his daughter. My heart sank, though, as I wandered farther and farther afield, each turn of the hall yielding nothing but dust and desolation. And the sound, always. Graystone was dead, hollowed out like the carcass of a beast. My father—or anyone, for that matter—hadn’t been here in a long time.

  I turned into what I recognized from my fevered state as the front entry hall, and the marble chilled my stockinged feet. I’d been re-dressed in my bloodied sweater and ripped blouse, but they weren’t much good for keeping out the cold.

  Across from the grand staircase to the second floor, I confronted a pair of pocket doors carved with a peculiar forest scene. Creatures cavorted under fruit-heavy trees, but they weren’t creatures I’d ever encountered. These were half men, half goat. I reached out a hand and touched them. They felt delicate under my fingers, wrought by an artist who had the finest touch with his chisel. They were beautiful. Strange. Certainly forbidden by the Proctors, I felt sure.

  I pulled my hand away. From behind the doors, springs wound and weights swung. Tick. Thock. Tick. Tick. Thock. I hadn’t managed to find Conrad or my father, but at least I’d found the source of the sound.

  I tugged at the brass pulls, made in the shapes of the north and east wind, great billowy brass clouds for hair and sharp lightning-bolt noses, rings caught in their teeth.