by Mimi Riser
You can escape the castle, escape Alan… But you’ll never outrun your own heart.
Chapter 7
The metamorphosis took most of the two-hour wait for the castle to fall asleep, along with some savage scissors work, a bottle of black ink, and some brown boot stain Tabitha found tucked away in a small cabinet in the memory-haunted bedroom. But the effort was worth it, if only to see Kathy’s eyes widen into blue moons, and her jaw drop down to her fancy silver belt buckle, when they rendezvoused in the passage outside the upper dungeons.
“Good Lord, Tabitha, you honestly are a witch! You’ve turned yourself into the cutest muchacho I’ve ever seen.”
“Gracias, señor, but my name eez Pedro.” The brown skinned lad grinned, giving his short black curls a little shake. “It was these loose cotton britches of yours that spawned the idea. They looked sort of ‘Mexican peasantry’ to me,” Tabitha added in her own voice. “If we meet anyone, I can be your servant. You need someone to polish those snakeskin boots and trim your phony mustache, after all.”
“Hmm…I’ll tell them I won you in a card game.” The black-clad gunslinger returned the grin. “And you can call me Señor Kid. Molly was right, you know, I am a bonny actress, in my own way. This is my Kid Connors costume. I use it for long rides over rough country. The Kid is young, but he looks sinister enough to make desperadoes think twice about messing with him. Don’t you agree?”
“Sí, señor, I shaking een my serape.”
“Serape, my foot. That’s a MacAllister tartan shawl. But it’s close enough, I guess… Where did you get those odd sandals? They’re the same tawny gold color as Alan’s good leather vest.” The grin went sly.
Pedro blushed under his brown stain. “Sí, Señor Keed, eez same color ’cause eez same leather. You theenk Señor Alan mind I cut up heez clothes?
“Not half as much as he’ll mind what you’ve done to your hair if he catches us, amigo,” the lethal looking outlaw quipped, shouldering open the heavy door to the first level of dungeons. It creaked and groaned like an iced river breaking up in a spring thaw.
Tabitha dropped her Pedro act like a hot tamale. “No! He’s not going to catch us. Don’t say that. Don’t even think it!” She grabbed on to the Kid’s gun belt so fiercely she jostled one of the pearl handled revolvers half loose from its holster. “Oh, sorry.” Shakily, she shoved it back into place while mentally trying to do the same thing with her jostled pulse. “Wait a minute… Are these the guns you had up on the tower? How did you get them back from—”
“I didn’t. Mr. Wizard still has Geordie’s Colts, so far as I know. And I hope they backfire in his face,” Kathy-Kid Connors declared. “These pieces are mine. I never go anywhere without them—though they’ve had to spend most of this charade hidden under the false bottom of my trunk. I couldn’t wear them as Mary MacAllister. They would have clashed with her fashionable Boston frocks. My Derringer had to suffice for Mary. It’s in my sleeve right now, by the way. I do enjoy the security of being armed to the teeth. And, in case you’re wondering”—she winked—“yes, I know how to use all three weapons. Quite well.”
“Good,” Tabitha rasped, “because I have a very big favor to ask you.”
Kathy’s eyebrows quirked up. “Yes?”
“If…if Alan should catch us,” the green eyed Mexican said dolefully, “I want you to shoot me.”
“Honestly! You Latin Americans are so emotional.” She yanked Tabitha into the dark passage and dragged the door shut behind them.
The echoes of its groaning timbers followed them into the gloom, like a living thing panting at their heels, as they moved, single file, in wavering circles of candlelight. The air was musty, but unusually chill. Tabitha pulled her improvised serape over both shoulders in an effort to stop the shivering that suddenly possessed her. Her gaze darted from side to side, searching the shadowy doorways that appeared every several yards along the narrow corridor. Most of them stood open, like long black mouths yawning in the wall, but a few were closed. Those were the ones that disturbed her the most; it was too easy to imagine anything lurking behind them.
“Pedro, stop breathing down my neck. You’re going to drip hot wax on me if you’re not careful,” Kathy whispered. “This isn’t much more than a root cellar. It’s where they keep most of the castle’s stores. Wait until we reach the lowest level. That’s the prison area. The cells have manacles and chains bolted to the walls, and there’s an authentic medieval-style torture chamber. Fully equipped. You’ll be thrilled.”
“I can hardly wait.” Tabitha clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering as the passageway took a sudden series of turns and began dipping downward.
Nor was it simple nerves causing her trembling, but the wash of emotions that seemed to be oozing from the very walls of the place. Old angers, pains, sorrows… She felt as though she was breathing them in along with the dank air itself. The feeling closed in tighter with every step they descended. By the time they were passing the doors of the first cells, she was nearly choking on it.
“Comanche warriors taken in skirmishes, that’s who the bulk of the prisoners were in the castle’s early years,” Kathy was explaining, as if she were some sort of macabre tour guide. “It was the old Raid-and-Trade game. The Comanche were constantly harassing them in those days, and the MacAllisters would capture as many as they could, so they could exchange them for their own people whom the Comanche had previously stolen.”
Tabitha scarcely needed the information. That overlay of images hovered all around her. Like a waking dream. And not a nice one.
She was aware of herself and Kathy scuffling as quickly as they dared through the dust and cobwebs of the rat infested passages, but she was also sensing things as they’d been decades before. She could almost hear the scraping of chains drifting out of the barred cubicles, smell the stench of scorched flesh permeating the torture room. Her tour guide’s news that the chamber of horrors was more decorative than functional didn’t calm her nausea one whit as they were forced to pass through it to reach the entrance to the escape tunnel.
“That’s wrong,” she whispered. “It has been used. Can’t you see the blood?”
“Where? There’s no blood, honey. Your eyes are playing tricks on you in the shadows. Angus told me these gruesome toys were mainly for show. The MacAllisters used them for scare tactics.”
“Angus was lying, then. Comanche don’t scare that easily. I know. Dr. Earnshaw used to tell me stories about them when I was small. He seemed pretty sure of his facts.”
“You may be right about that. Our old Highland matchmaker may have felt Mary’s cultured Bostonian ears were too delicate to tolerate the truth,” Kathy speculated, a grim smile stretching her false mustache tight. “But even so, there’s no blood here. Any stains would have faded by now. This part of the dungeon hasn’t been used in ages.”
I wasn’t referring to stains, Tabitha thought with a creeping chill. The blood she’d spotted had seemed sticky wet and fresh. A vision from the past? Perhaps. But it couldn’t all be visions. She pressed her lips shut to keep from crying out over the one cell she had just dared to peek into. There was no point in alarming Kathy that her last statement was false, that the dungeon was still in use—or had been until very recently.
Where was its prisoner now? Its obviously well cared for prisoner…
That had been the shock of the empty cell. Not its horrors, but its lack of them. Even at a glance, the room had shown signs of long occupancy, but an occupancy someone had tried to make bearable with creature comforts. The cell’s furnishings were every bit as good as those in the upper chambers of the keep, and the remains of the supper on the table by the bed had looked better than the meal Tabitha had eaten that evening, herself. How curious.
Too curious.
She shuddered, not only from the mystery of this missing, pampered prisoner, but from the images of all the suffering souls who’d been locked down here before him. All the warriors who had been treated to
the rack and hot irons instead of clean sheets and beefsteak.
“The worst torture, though, must have come simply from being confined in the dank and the dark,” she mused aloud. “For a Comanche, used to open space and light and air, that must have seemed a living death.”
“Now on that score, you are right,” Kathy agreed. “But before you feel too sorry for them, remember that the Comanche made free use of some pretty grisly torments of their own. The MacAllisters were only fighting fire with fire.”
“Marvelous. That way everyone gets burned,” Tabitha said hoarsely. “I’ve worked a lot of math problems in my life, but I’ve never been able to make two wrongs equal one right. Most people don’t see it that way, however.”
“It may surprise you to learn that at least one MacAllister did. A young woman named Elspeth. Molly told me the tale. That’s how I found out about the escape tunnel. It’s all wonderfully dramatic. Would you like to hear about her?”
“No.”
Undaunted, Kathy plunged straight into the narrative.
Tabitha tried not to listen at first. The last thing she needed was more drama. There were too many tales already crowding into her consciousness as the dungeon relentlessly whispered its secrets to her. But this one eclipsed them all. The further the story progressed, the less she felt she was hearing it. It seemed more like a memory rising out of some long dark spot within her, and Kathy’s words served merely to illuminate the details Tabitha had forgotten.
“This all happened several decades ago, when Molly was just a girl,” the tale began. “Elspeth was the one who taught Molly herbcraft. She came from a long line of Highland healers, and was very skilled at it, apparently. Molly said she was also very beautiful, very headstrong, and impossibly independent. Sounds like my kind of gal, in fact.
“Anyway, it didn’t win her many friends within the clan, but she insisted upon traipsing down into the dungeons to tend the Comanche prisoners. When the laird forbade it, she bribed the blacksmith to make a skeleton key for her, and continued her ministering angel act on the sly.
“Most of the prisoners would be freed in a matter of days, but the important exchanges sometimes took longer. And once there was a warrior—some kind of shaman, I believe—whom the MacAllisters considered too dangerous to release at all. He was known as the Panther, and even his own people lived in awe of him. It was rumored he had the power to turn himself into a wild beast, and that he could control others with a mere thought.
“Superstitious rubbish, if you ask me. I mean, if he’d really had any special abilities, wouldn’t you think he could have freed himself? But he couldn’t. Molly told me he languished down here for weeks on end, while Elspeth grew more and more worried. She didn’t view him as a prisoner, you see. To her, he was just a wounded, suffering man, and she took her responsibilities as a healer very seriously. When none of her usual treatments offered any relief, she did the only other thing she could to save his life. She helped him escape through the tunnel we’re about to use.
“It was all done so neatly, no one should ever have suspected her, but the truth did come out, somehow, and she found herself in quite a stew. Especially since her habit of helping captives wasn’t the only black mark against her. Elspeth had also alienated herself from the clan by falling in love with a man outside of it—Jeremy something or other. Very dashing, but a bit on the intense side, Molly said. He was some sort of frontiersman-missionary who had drifted into the area to trade with and preach to the Indians.
“Because of Jeremy, Elspeth had spurned a marriage offer from one of the clan leaders. One who took her refusal as an unforgivable personal slight. Men really are so thin-skinned about things like that—they can dish it out, but they can’t take it. At any rate, she was locked up. Not down here. The dungeons were just for male prisoners. Elspeth was shut in a tower. I don’t know which one…”
I do, Tabitha thought, her hands trembling so badly, the motion nearly extinguished her candle flame.
“…And charges were brought against her. Not treason, as you might expect, but witchcraft. She had been suspected of it even before the Panther’s escape—her cures often worked almost too well. Plus, there was the silly little matter of her cat, Caliban. He was the descendant of two kittens who had been brought over from Scotland by her mother. Some rare Highland breed, I think. Blacker than midnight, and much larger than an ordinary tom, according to Molly—though one could imagine that everything looks larger than ordinary to Molly, size being relative and all.
“Besides that, Caliban tagged everywhere after Elspeth, like he was her shadow, which had led some to suspect he was her demon familiar instead of her pet. They were planning on killing the poor thing after she was imprisoned, but Molly told me he escaped them. And there’s been this ludicrous legend floating around ever since that he haunts the castle, searching for her. Of all the ridicu— Oh, good heavens. Here, relight your candle from mine, and mind how you hold it or it’ll go out again. There are some queer drafts down here.”
“Wh-what happened to her?” Tabitha stammered, her voice thinner than a moth’s wing. This was where the story went dark in her own memory. Except for that bloodcurdling cry…
“Oh, that’s the juiciest part. She was sentenced to be burned at the stake. And then rescued at the last possible moment by her frontiersman lover and a band of Comanche led by none other than the Panther himself! Isn’t that delicious? Some of them stole in through the escape tunnel, fought their way up into the outer court, and managed to raise the portcullis and lower the drawbridge to allow the main group in. They attacked in full force just as Elspeth was about to become the first Texas barbecue.
“Not that she could have known what was happening. She’d been drugged, and a black hood had been put over her head. The MacAllisters aren’t monsters, just devout traditionalists. They were doing what their private legal code demanded, but they were trying to make it as painless for her as possible.
“There was no similar regard for the Panther. He and Jeremy had been fighting their way together toward the stake, when Jeremy suddenly stumbled, pulling the Panther down with him. He made it up again quickly, but the Panther lay dazed for an instant. By the time he’d staggered to his feet, it seemed half the clan was on him. He fought like his namesake, but they dragged him to earth through sheer weight of numbers. Molly said his final battle cry as he lay buried beneath them practically tore her heart out by its roots.”
“They killed him,” Tabitha whispered, feeling like some long sought question had finally been answered. Only the answer brought no relief, just a deeper sense of sorrow and loss.
“Yes. And no. Molly was a little vague on that point,” Kathy mused, the eerie glow from the candles flickering over her face. They had come to what appeared to be a dead-end, and she was reaching toward an unlit torch in an iron wall bracket. “His body was certainly destroyed, hacked to ribbons by claymores, and they burned his corpse in the pyre that had been meant for Elspeth. Very thrifty, these Scotsmen—waste not, want not. But…”
“But what?” Tabitha prompted, desperate to know the truth, yet dreading it at the same time.
“Well, Molly claims to have seen Elspeth’s cat racing through the courtyard at the precise moment of that horrible scream. And she has this peculiar notion that the Panther escaped…in a way…by, um…hurling his…his inner essence, if you will, into Caliban.”
Kathy grasped the torch and gave it a sharp downward tug. There was a raspy scraping and grating, and a narrow section of wall slid open, revealing something that looked like a pathway straight to Hades.
“Utter hogwash, of course,” she continued. “That poor man was well and truly killed. But it wasn’t entirely for naught. His sacrifice gave Jeremy the time he needed to reach Elspeth. He needed the extra time, you see, because during the fall, he’d somehow taken a nasty blow to the face and was reeling like a drunk when he arrived at the stake. Molly was horrified for a second that he’d accidentally slice Elspeth’s
throat instead of her bonds. But that final cry from the Panther put steel in his spine, it seems. Just as it sounded, Jeremy pulled himself upright, freed Elspeth, and carried her off. They got clean away.”
Stepping into the tunnel, she beckoned for Tabitha to follow. “And we’d better move quickly and quietly now if we’re to do the same.”
Neither of them spoke again until they had reached the end of the dank, low, raw-beamed tunnel. It took 183 steps. Tabitha counted every one to help steady her legs. She simultaneously counted Kathy’s longer strides and every support timber they passed. No mean mental feat to keep the three tallies separate, but the effort served to drive all other thoughts and images into the back attic recesses of her mind—where she sincerely hoped they would stay. The only thing she wanted to think about was getting as far away from Castle MacAllister and all its occupants—past and present—as swiftly as possible.
Outlaw Cat Kildare seemed to be of a like mind, the only difference being that she was obviously enjoying herself in the process. Climbing through the trapdoor at the end of the tunnel with an easy feline grace, she reached down a hand and helped Tabitha scramble up into the moonlit prairie, grinning like the devil behind her phony mustache.
“This will be a new experience for me. I’ve never tried horse thieving before. Con-artistry is more my line, but I do believe in expanding one’s horizons whenever possible. And I know just the mount I want, too. She doesn’t belong to the MacAllisters, either.”
She turned toward the nearby corrals. By the time she’d reached the closest one, Kid Connors was in full control, complete with swaggering gait and western accent.
“Hey, you sweet thang,” he drawled to a stunning black mare with four white socks and a star on her forehead. “You look jus’ rarin’ t’go, an’ thass zac’ly what we’all need. Raht, Pedro?”
