Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I’m scared,” she said, and the Bailiff made a concerned sort of face and knelt down beside her.

  “I won’t lie to you,” he said. “There are plenty enough things in the house to be afraid of, and not a few of them are right over our heads. But your coming here today has been arranged. No harm will befall you, child, not so long as you mind your Ps and Qs.”

  “You’ll be with me,” she said and held his hand more tightly.

  “As long as I can be, but I’ve told you already, there are places you must go without me. There are places you must see alone.”

  Soldier stared up at the entrance to the attic, and she wondered if he’d stop her if she tried to run away, if she turned and hurried back past the paintings and down the stairs, to the cellar and the tunnels and the shadows where she belonged.

  “What is it, Soldier?” the Bailiff asked. “What is it you’re not telling me?”

  “The woman in the desert,” Soldier replied, “I dreamed of her again yesterday.”

  “The black woman?” the Bailiff asked, and then he glanced up at the trapdoor.

  “Yes, sir. The one who told me about Esmeribetheda and the djinniyeh. We were walking together in the ruined city, and she told me not to come here today.”

  The Bailiff watched her silently for a moment, then took a deep breath and rubbed at his beard.

  “She said that a terrible thing was waiting for me here,” Soldier added.

  “Did she now?” the Bailiff asked and tugged at his whiskers. “Were those precisely the words she used?”

  “Yes sir,” Soldier said. “She said the hounds mean to take my life from me.”

  “But the hounds already have your life, child. You’ve belonged to them since the Cuckoo brought you from the home of your father and mother.”

  “Well, I know that,” Soldier said, and the Bailiff shook his head. “I told her that.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “That there are lies all about me, that my entire life has been spun from lies, and that the greatest lies, the ones which will take my life, are waiting for me with the ghost in the attic. She said that I can’t trust you anymore,” and then Soldier looked down, keeping her eyes on the dingy floral pattern of the rug because she didn’t want to see his expression.

  “And do you believe her?” the Bailiff asked, each word tumbling through the air like iron.

  “It was only a dream,” Soldier said. “All of it, it was only a dream.”

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “Do you think that matters?” she asked and kicked at the rug with the toe of her shoe.

  “And why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

  “I wanted to see the attic. I thought if I told you, you might not show me.”

  “Look at me,” he said, and she did. In the dim light of the hallway, his face didn’t seem quite so round, and Soldier could see the dark circles beneath his eyes, eyes that had gone the oily color of coal. “We play our assigned parts,” he told her, “and that’s all we get. My part was to bring you here, and your part is to enter. We all play our parts, little Soldier, nothing more.”

  “That’s exactly what she told me you’d say.”

  “Is it now? Well, I guess that means she’s a right smart nigger lady, doesn’t it?”

  “Sometimes,” Soldier said, “she frightens me.”

  “I wouldn’t worry your pretty head about her any longer,” the Bailiff said, standing up, straightening his rumpled seersucker suit, and then he reached for the rope handle on the trapdoor and pulled. The rusted hinges and springs screamed and popped, stiff from long decades of disuse, and Soldier wanted to cover her ears, but she didn’t. “Where you’re headed, I doubt she’ll be able to follow.”

  Soldier doesn’t remember being lowered to the floor, doesn’t remember the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles leaving her, doesn’t remember the feeling coming back to her hands and feet, and whether or not it was the girl who untied Odd Willie or if maybe she did it herself—but none of that shit matters, none of that shit matters at all.

  “I’m so goddamn cold,” Odd Willie shivers, and she feels his forehead again. She’s pretty sure he has a fever; maybe Ballou’s men busted something inside him, and now Odd Willie is bleeding to death. “I’m freezing my fucking dick off.”

  “I don’t know what you expect me to do about it,” she says, and Soldier peers into the darkness beyond the muddy alcove where they’re waiting, huddled together naked and hurting, waiting to see if anyone’s coming back to finish the job, or if they’ve been left for dead. The alcove is just outside the ossuary. Soldier managed to pry loose the upper half of a femur from the wall, not much against guns and magick, but better than nothing, and she grips it tight in both hands and tries not to feel the cold.

  “I’m gonna murder the bitch,” Odd Willie says. “I swear, Soldier, if we ever fucking see daylight again, I’m gonna kill her with my goddamn bare hands.”

  “You’re gonna have to get in line behind me,” Soldier tells him. “Now, keep your voice down. I’m trying to hear something.”

  “What? What the hell are you trying to hear?”

  “Anything,” Soldier replies, “anything but you.”

  The dark is playing tricks with her eyes, painting sudden movements from the stillness, faking her out, and she ignores it and listens. The darkness is filled with sound—her heartbeat, hers and Willie’s breathing, dripping water, a persistent, industrious gnawing that she knows is a rat wearing down its incisors against a piece of bone, and, occasionally, a distant splash. A low murmur that might be voices sifted through the cold and the black, and she leans close to Odd Willie and whispers in his ear.

  “I don’t think we’re under the cemetery anymore,” she says. “I think we might be beneath the river.”

  “Who gives a good goddamn?” Odd Willie says, and then he giggles, and then he moans very loudly.

  Soldier lays the femur on the ground at her feet, and then she seizes Odd Willie by the jaw and forces his head around until she’s pretty sure he’s facing her. He makes a surprised, pissed-off noise, tries to jerk away, and she digs her nails into his face. With her left hand she grabs his testicles.

  “What the fuck’s your fucking problem?” he mumbles around her fingers.

  “Right now, you’re my problem, Odd Willie. We’re in some pretty serious shit here, but we’re not dead, not yet, and I don’t intend to end up that way. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” Odd Willie grunts, and when he tries to pull free again, she digs her nails deep into the soft, hairy flesh around his scrotum.

  “I said, do you understand?”

  “Yeah bitch, I fucking understand,” he growls back at her, growling like a wounded puppy. “I understand you’re as big a psycho as that cunt Saben.”

  “Be that as it fucking may, Odd Willie, you’re gonna keep your mouth shut, and if we’re real goddamn lucky, we might still find a way out of this mess.”

  “Fine. Whatever you say. Now please just let go of my fucking balls, okay?”

  “I know you’re hurt,” she tells him, slowly relaxing her hold on his face and his crotch. “And I know you’re scared shitless, because I am, too. But we have to get out of here. We have to find a way out if we want to be sure that Saben gets what she’s got coming to her.”

  “Fine,” he says again, and when she lets go, Soldier feels him pull away, pressing himself against the damp stone wall of the tunnel.

  “Something’s gone wrong, Willie, something the Bailiff didn’t see coming, something he couldn’t anticipate.”

  “Fuck that,” Odd Willie mutters and giggles very softly. “I think he sent us up here to fucking die. I think this is payback for lots of shit, Soldier. Cocksucker’s probably in with Ballou, Saben, the whole stinking lot.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Soldier says, picking up the femur again. “I’ve been thinking the same thing, turning it over and over
in my head, but it just doesn’t add up.”

  “You fucking grab my balls again,” Odd Willie mumbles, “I swear I’m gonna kill you.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Soldier tells him. “You better start thinking a little less about killing and a little more about keeping your own sorry ass alive and kicking. Remember your place—”

  “Fuck that, too. Down here, ain’t no places anymore, Soldier. Ain’t no rank. No fucking order. Down here—”

  “I’m gonna stand up,” Soldier says, and she takes a deep breath, even though it hurts like hell. “Can you get up, Odd Willie? Can you walk?”

  “I can fucking walk,” he replies. “Christ, I’m freezing my ass off.”

  Soldier nods and listens to the suffocating darkness and the muffled, magnified tunnel noises, trying to fix a direction on what might have been voices, human voices or hound voices or something in between. They seemed to be coming from somewhere far away on her right, so she decides to try to keep to the left for as long as possible. Then Odd Willie vomits again, and she feels it spatter hot across her feet. Soldier waits until he’s done, tells him to stay close to the wall, to keep his left hand on the wall and stay right there behind her, and she stands up. Both her knees pop, and she’s suddenly so dizzy that she starts to sit back down.

  “Just don’t you leave me,” Odd Willie says. “Whatever happens, don’t you dare fucking leave me down here alone.”

  “I won’t. I’m not going to leave you,” she promises, though she knows that she will, if that’s what it takes to make it out, if Odd Willie can’t keep up. Soldier rests her weight against the tunnel wall until the dizziness isn’t so bad.

  “I’d rather you fucking killed me than leave me down here by myself, Soldier.”

  “Just stay close. Keep the wall on your left.”

  Beneath her feet the floor is an obstacle course of uneven, muddy cobblestones and puddles of icy water, and she almost slips twice. When she’s gone forty, maybe forty-five yards, Soldier stops and lets Odd Willie catch up to her. She can hear the voices again, louder than before, though still not loud enough to make out whatever it is they’re saying. But at least now she’s certain that they’re somewhere on her right, even if she can’t begin to guess how close they might be. She’s not even sure how wide or how high this tunnel is; she grips the broken thighbone and takes another step forward.

  “You smell that?” Odd Willie asks, and Soldier stops and sniffs at the damp air.

  “I smell mud,” she says. “Mud and mold, and that’s about it. What do you smell, Odd Willie?”

  “Smoke. I smell fucking smoke. Woodsmoke. Man, I wish I had a cigarette.”

  Soldier sniffs at the air again, and this time she catches the faintest whiff of burning, and she also realizes that it’s not as stagnant as before. There’s a draft here as the air’s pulled weakly past them, back towards the ossuary or some side tunnel that they’ve missed.

  “We get out of this shit with our skins, I’ll buy you a whole goddamn carton,” she tells Odd Willie, and she can hear the clumsy slap of his footsteps, so she knows that he’s still following her. “I suppose you were never very good with all the hocus-pocus crap, either,” she says.

  “I can do a few things,” he replies, wheezing a little now, and Soldier wonders if maybe the goons punctured one of his lungs.

  “Yeah? Like what, precisely?”

  “I’m no damn magician,” Odd Willie says, “so don’t go getting a hard-on or anything. But I learned a little here and there.”

  Up ahead there’s a sudden loud, clattering commotion, like someone dropping a burlap sack filled with bones, and Soldier stops and lies almost flat on the tunnel floor, instinctively making as small a target of herself as possible; she holds the broken femur under her, gripped close to her chest. She can’t hear Odd Willie’s big flat feet anymore, so she assumes that he’s done the same. There are smaller clatterings, then a whisking sound like a straw broom on wood, and she holds her breath and waits for silence or whatever’s coming instead of silence.

  Ballou’s a maniac, the Bailiff said the night before they left Providence, early Sunday morning, and she was naked then, too. He’s a spoiled child fascinated with the smell of his own offal. But he’s also a threat, Soldier, a threat that never should have been permitted to become anything more than a nuisance.

  You’re telling me to kill him? Soldier asked, and the Bailiff smiled and rubbed at his nose.

  Nothing too fancy, he said. Try not to make a mess.

  Just the two of us? Just me and Odd fucking Willie?

  The Bailiff stopped rubbing his nose, which seemed redder than usual, and nodded. We have people up there. There won’t be much resistance. We’ve been softening him from the inside. Trust me, little Soldier. You and young Master Lothrop will be quite sufficient to the task at hand. Nothing too showy, though.

  The sweeping sound has stopped, and Soldier exhales slowly, her breath escaping almost silently between her teeth. But she doesn’t move, lies dead still on the uneven cobbles and mud and listens to the darkness.

  Nothing more than is necessary.

  And it’s just gonna be me and Odd Willie against the whole damn warren? she asked him again. Odd Willie Lothrop the firebug, the guy with no eyebrows?

  The Bailiff sneezed, then took out a white handkerchief and blew his red nose. I shall expect you back by Sunday evening, he said, seven thirty at the latest, and returned the handkerchief to the breast pocket of his jacket. There will be a cleanup crew coming down from Boston sometime around midnight, and I want you out of there long before then.

  So, where the hell are they? she thinks, because it’s surely long past midnight on Sunday. It might be past midnight on fucking Monday, for all she knows, and Soldier swears on the names of gods she doesn’t believe in that she’d trade another half hour as George Ballou’s punching bag for just one shot of Dickel. Just one shot of whiskey to make her hands stop shaking.

  “It’s gone,” Odd Willie whispers, and she can hear him getting slowly to his feet. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”

  Soldier waits another two or three seconds, then rolls over onto her back; a sharp corner of one of the cobblestones digs into a bruised spot beneath her left shoulder blade, bruised muscle and maybe something in there’s fractured, as well, and she has to bite the end of her tongue to keep from crying out. The dizziness returns, and she lies still, waiting for it to pass.

  “Soldier?” Odd Willie asks, his voice suddenly lost and close to panic. “Can you hear me? Soldier—”

  “Yes,” she hisses around the pain in her back. “I’m right fucking here. Keep it down. Jesus…”

  “I thought you’d left me. I thought maybe you’d gotten away and left me.”

  “I just fucking said that I wasn’t going to leave you,” and she shuts her eyes and swallows against the pain and a wave of nausea. She imagines the Bailiff, holed up somewhere with his boys and their drugs, waiting for whatever it is he’s started to blow over, the calm after the storm. She pretends he can hear her thoughts, pretends he’d care if he could. I’m not going to die here in the dark and the mud, you bastard. I’m not going to die down here with Odd Willie while that bitch Saben is still alive somewhere.

  “I can do this one thing,” Odd Willie wheezes. “Magick, I mean. There’s this one thing I’m really pretty good with, but it makes me sick as a goddamned poisoned dog. So it’s kind of a fucking last resort.”

  “Willie,” Soldier says, “we’re naked and beat half to fucking death, lost in the dark, surrounded by people that want us dead, and the only weapon I have is part of a damn rotten bone. Unless you’ve got a couple of nine-millimeters tucked up your skinny ass, I’m thinking, yeah, maybe this is pretty goddamned last resort.”

  “Sure,” he says, “I know. You think I don’t know how fucked we are?” And then he doesn’t say anything else, and there’s only the sounds of the two of them breathing and the steady plip, plip, plip of water striking water.
>
  “Well, is it a fucking secret?” she asks finally, and she can hear Willie sitting back down again.

  “No, it’s not a secret,” he says. “I just don’t like to do it, that’s all. So, you know, usually I don’t let on.”

  Soldier opens her eyes, not that it makes any difference, and she sits up, raising herself with her arms and trying to ignore the pain from the bruised shoulder and just about everywhere else. The burning-wood smell’s getting stronger, she thinks, either that or she’s only noticing it more because now she knows it’s there.

  “Don’t make me ask again,” she says and glares at the place she thinks Odd Willie is sitting. “Spit it out.”

  “There’s this…this fucking thing, right, this thing I can call up, summon, conjure, whatever the hell you want to call it. This thing.”

  “What kind of a thing?”

  “Fuck all if I know. Maybe it’s a demon, but I kind of doubt it. What kind of demon would take orders from me? Maybe it’s a ghost, the ghost of something—”

  “What does it do?” Soldier asks him, grasping at straws because they’re all she has left to grasp, and Odd Willie giggles.

  “Just the usual shit,” he wheezes, coughs, then starts again. “Roll over. Fetch. Play fucking dead. Steal some beer. Kill a bunch of motherfuckers, if that’s what I tell it to do.”

  “Fuck.” Soldier laughs, wiping some of the mud off her belly and thighs. “Christ, and you were gonna get around to telling me about this little pet of yours when?”

  “You don’t know how it feels,” Odd Willie says. “I’ve told the Bailiff. It’s not a secret.”

  “Does it feel a whole lot worse than Ballou’s dick up your ass? Or a bullet through your fucking skull? Does it feel worse than dying?”

  “Yeah,” Odd Willie says and coughs again. “Yeah, Soldier, I think maybe it does.”

  The janitors have been given the strictest instructions in this matter, the Bailiff said. And they’re very thorough agents. Nothing alive gets out. Nothing, Soldier. Not even a sewer rat. So, no stragglers, if you catch my drift. Get in, do what I’ve asked, and then get out. Do not expect help should anything happen to go awry.