Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  “Roy!” She strained toward him, then slumped in her restraints. “Get away from here.”

  Shellane tugged at the bands. There was no visible lock, no catch. They looked to have grown around her.

  “They’ll be back soon.” Grace tried to push him away. “You have to go!”

  He studied the wall beside her.

  “They’ll kill you,” Grace said.

  “Be quiet,” he told her. “I’m working.”

  “If they see you, they’ll know. I won’t be able to come to you anymore. Please!”

  Next to one end of the band encircling her waist was a single raised seam, barely an inch long. Close by it, a board had been worked loose, leaving a half-inch aperture aglow with white radiance.

  “You can’t help. This is just going to make things worse for me,” she said. “I want you to leave now!”

  He unbuckled his belt, whipped it off, and pried with the buckle at the loose board.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Trying to understand this.”

  He managed to pry the board up sufficiently that he could grip it with the tips of his fingers. He pulled it back farther and put an eye close to the gap he had made. A flash of light, and he saw an unfamiliar night sky with too many stars and a glowing red cloud occupying its southern quadrant. Hovering at an unguessable distance between him and the cloud was a dark wormlike structure. He had the impression he was looking at something of immense size.

  Another flash of light, then another, and another yet…

  In the intervals between flashes, he was afforded glimpses of different vistas. Many he was unable to quantify, their geography too vast and bewildering to be comprehensible. Those that he was able to comprehend all possessed the quality of immensity. Great reaches containing strangely proportioned structures. By the time he pressed the board back into place, he thought he understood the house. A sketchy understanding, but the basic picture was clear. The doors were programmed (he could think of no better term) to admit you to different portions of the house; but before you settled into the room to which you had been directed, you saw the place through which you transited, or perhaps it was simply another place that you might have transited to. A place removed from or perhaps inclusive of the house. There was much he was unsure of, but he was sure of one thing—the doors could be reprogrammed.

  Grace continued to warn him away, but he refused to listen. Wishing it were sharper, he pushed the tongue of the belt buckle against the seam beside her neck, denting it slightly. He pushed harder, lodging the point in the dent and jamming it down with both hands. The seam writhed and suddenly deflated; the bands holding her retracted without a sound, appearing to flow back into the boards behind her. She let out a gasp and staggered away from the wall.

  “The doors,” he said. “They can be adjusted…calibrated to take you away from the house. I’m not sure what this place is, but it embodies physical principles. Mechanical principles. Maybe…”

  Grace planted both hands on his chest and sent him reeling backward. “You’re not hearing me!”

  “I’m telling you how to escape,” he said.

  She tried to shove him again, but he caught her hands.

  “You’re not hearing me,” he said angrily. “I’m trying to help you. The uglies…they manipulate the house. And they’re stupid, right? Everyone I’ve talked to says that. So if they can do it, the chances are you can manage it, too.”

  Grace twisted away from him. “You don’t know! You’ve only been here a little while. No time at all. Most of us have been here for years.”

  “But you haven’t tried, have you? All you’ve done is mope about. Why don’t you take a moment and…”

  “Do you want to die? That’s what’s going to happen.”

  “Just listen and I’ll go.”

  “I heard what you told me, all right? I’ll check the doors!”

  “And watch the uglies,” he said. “When you’re with them, watch what they do with the doors.”

  She started to speak, but instead stared past him, looking at something over his shoulder with fierce concentration. There was no sign of fear in her face, though fear, Shellane understood upon turning, must be responsible for her intensity of focus.

  Three of the uglies had come into view around a bend and were crouched as if in preparation for an attack, squeezed together by a narrowing of the walls. Two of them resembled the men imprisoned in the cells, but the third, the biggest, was identical to the man who had pursued Shellane through the woods. Severely deformed. Jagged orbits shadowing his eyes, a darkly crimson mouth visible behind a toothy jack o’lantern grimace. Shellane braced himself for a fight. Despite Grace’s assertion that they were strong, they looked spindly and frail, and he believed he could do some damage. But rather than charging at him, they began to whimper like a chorus of terrified children, gaspy and quavering. The one on the right lifted its head to the ceiling, as if seeking divine assistance, and gave forth with a feeble ululation. Urine dribbled down its leg. The others hid their eyes, but continued to peek at him, as if not daring to turn away from the cause of their terror.

  They were afraid of him, Shellane realized. No other explanation satisfied. He took a step toward them—their whimpers rose in pitch and volume. Definitely afraid. He caught Grace’s hand, tried to pull her away. If they could get clear, he thought, he would have time to come up with a plan. But she yanked her hand free and dropped to her knees, then sank into a reclining position, her eyes averted, like a child who sees the inevitable, some terrible punishment, and seeks refuge in collapse.

  The uglies still seemed afraid, but Shellane’s confidence had been weakened by Grace’s surrender. Nevertheless, he steeled himself and ran at them, waving his arms, shouting, hoping to drive them off. They scuttled away, yet when he stopped his advance, they, too, stopped, huddling together, plucking and clutching at one another like fretful monkeys. He made a second menacing run. Once again they fell back, but not so far this time. A touch of curiosity showed in their crudely drawn faces and one of them growled, bassy and articulated, a bleakly mechanical noise, like the idling of some beastly machine. Two lesser yet equally chilling growls joined in guttural disharmony with the first, and he lifted hands in a defensive posture, knowing now that he would be forced to fight.

  But it was no fight.

  In a few shambling strides they were on him, a wave of bony edges and jagged, blunt teeth that carried him down, enveloping him in a bitter stench. He managed to land a single punch, striking the chest of the tallest. Like hitting a wall of granite. Then he was tossed, kicked, slammed into the boards, worried, scratched, bitten, and kicked again until he lost consciousness. When he woke, once he managed to unscramble his senses, he found he was being dragged along by the feet. Head bumping, arms flopping. He heard Grace scream and struggled to wrench free, but the hands gripping his ankles were irresistible. He twisted about, trying to find her. Caught a glimpse of her being carried aloft, held by the collar of her jacket in one long-fingered gray hand. Bile flushed into his throat. The effortful grunting breath of the creature dragging him seemed the sound of his panic. He closed his eyes and summoned his reserves, focusing, contriving a central place in his mind from which he could observe and judge what, if anything, might be done.

  They came to a door. The creature released one of his ankles; through slitted eyes, Shellane watched it press a forefinger in sequence against the raised seams clumped together on the wall. The door opened and they were sucked inside. Flashing white lights disoriented Shellane and, despite himself, he cried out. His tormentor bent down to him, its insult of a mouth—wide enough to swallow a ham—widened further in a smile, its tongue dark red and thick, like a turtle’s. Beneath the ridges of its orbits, its eyes were visible. Gleaming not with reflected light, it seemed, but with the animal sheen of a rotted deliquescence. It slashed at his face with its thumb. A warm wetness spread across his cheek, and he realized it had sliced him with its thumbn
ail. It seized him by the shirtfront and he was lifted up, dangled over a gulf—it appeared that a boulder had hurtled down from heaven or the heights of whatever place this was, smashing everything in its path, creating a central shaft in one of the tenements, leaving a hole roughly twenty feet in diameter. The shaft its passage had made fell away into shadow, walled by a broken honeycomb of exposed rooms and splintered black boards. Before he could fully absorb the sight, the creature swung him as easily as he himself might swing a cat and let him fly out through the air. A desperate cry tore from his throat. The ruin pinwheeled. The pull of gravity and death took him at the top of his arc. Turning sideways as he fell, he saw a gaping darkness rush up at him, and the next instant he slammed into something that drove wind from his chest and light from his brain. Only after regaining consciousness a second time did he understand that he had been thrown completely across the gap, and that the uglies, bearing Grace with them, had leaped across after him.

  They passed through another door. Shellane was too groggy to register much about the room beyond, but he caught sight of a hearth in which a roaring fire had been built, and though he realized he was not the most reliable of witnesses at the moment, he could have sworn he saw tiny homunculi playing in the flames, hopping from log to log. Grace was speaking urgently, the words unintelligible, but he had the impression that she was pleading. Another room. His head had cleared to a degree, but his vision was still impaired—or so he assumed. Then he recognized that the indistinctness of the large shadowy figure sitting cross-legged in a corner was due not to any failure of his eyesight, but rather to the fact that its black substance was in a state of flux. A muffled shouting issued from the figure, and as Shellane was hauled past it, he saw that the whirling black stuff was a filmy shell encasing a human form, and further saw a man’s face within the shell, pain contorting his features. At the next door the tallest of the uglies again manipulated a little patch of ridges in the wood. Shellane felt a perverse satisfaction in knowing that he had been right about the doors.

  The room into which the creature then dragged him was small, the ceiling so low that the uglies had to walk in a half-crouch, with a gabled roof and a shuttered window that extended up from the floor. Shellane was left to lie beside the window and, when one of the uglies threw the shutters open onto a foggy darkness, he saw a huge black fist jutting from the boards directly below and realized where he must be. He was past fighting. His ribs ached, his left knee throbbed, and his mind worked sluggishly. Even when a rope was placed around his neck, he could not rouse himself, but only wondered how they were going to pass his body through the fist, a question answered when another of the uglies pressed a finger to a ridged patch beside the window and, with terrible slowness, the fist uncurled as if to welcome him. Grace let out a shriek. He turned on his back and spotted her at the door. Two of their captors were fondling her roughly, grabbing her breasts and buttocks. He started to tell her something, but forgot what he had been going to say. It became irrelevant as a foot nudged him out the window.

  He dropped only a foot or so, but the rope choked him and his feet kicked against the boards. In reflex, he grabbed the rope, tried to haul himself back up; but he was being lowered and made no progress. Overhead, the uglies were framed by the window, one embracing a still-struggling Grace, whose face was pressed into its chest, and the biggest paying out the rope. It was all chaotic, a delirium. His vision darkened, and he felt a tremendous heat inside his skull. His right foot bumped against the half-curled hand, and then he was inside it, waist-deep in its loose grip. He caught at its upper edge, levering himself up with his elbows, refusing to be lowered any farther. The surface of the uppermost finger was crusted with brownish stains. He puzzled over them, wondering what they might be. That question was answered as the hand began to close into a fist and he understood that some who’d had the misfortune to happen onto the house while alive had chosen to be crushed rather than hanged. Gasping for air, his throat constricted, he looked up to Grace, not seeking help but dimly moved to find her. The figures above were joined in a wobbling dance, pushing one another to gain a better view of the proceedings, communicating in grunts and growls and screams. And then the smallest of the four, the shrillest, flung herself at the tallest, clawing at its eyes. The rope came uncoiling down toward Shellane. He released his grip on the hand, allowing himself to fall, this due to a sympathetic reaction to the rope’s fall as much as to his vague comprehension that by doing so he would not hang. His head struck the first joint of the fist’s little finger, and he dropped the last few feet, landing on his back with a jolting impact.

  He did not black out, and the recognition that he was free penetrated the confused clutter of his thoughts. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he pushed up to a standing position and began a limping retreat. Grace screamed at him to run, and he threw himself forward with his shoulders, dragging his left leg, moving blindly through the fog. He knew she must still be struggling with the uglies, or else they would be on him—his pace was much too slow to outrun them—and this spurred him to limp faster. There was nothing he could do for her, yet this pragmatic view did not sit well with him and every step he took sparked feelings of shame and inadequacy. Wincing whenever he planted his left foot, he kept on going until, after only a little while, he heard the wind sighing in the spruce and water lightly slapping the shore, and realized that he was safe, an infinity removed from certain lesser demons and their rickety black hell, and utterly alone.

  Once he had bandaged his wounds, believing that Grace would not return to the cabin, that she was lodged in a cell filled with burning light or enduring some crueler punishment, Shellane spent the remainder of the night hoping he was wrong. Whatever pain she was experiencing, he was to blame—he had insinuated himself into a situation that he had not fully grasped, and as a result he had caused her situation, already bleak, to worsen. Staying at the house would have served no purpose, yet he felt he had breached a bond implicit to the relationship, and he castigated himself for having abandoned her. The hours stretched and he understood once again how frail and attenuated his attachment to life had become. Without Grace, without the renewal of passion she had inspired, he could not conceive of going on as before, preparing a new identity, finding a new hiding place. What could any place offer him apart from the fundamentals of survival? And what good were they without a reason to survive? As it grew increasingly clear that she would not return, he sat at the table breeding a dull fog of thought, illuminated now and then by fits of memory. Her face, her laugh, her moods. Yet those memories did not brighten him. All the ordinary instances of her person that shone so extraordinarily bright in his mind were grayed with doubt. He knew almost nothing about her and he suspected that if he were capable of analysis, he might discover that the things he knew were dross not gold, and that she was not in the least extraordinary. She simply seemed to fit a shape in his brain, to be unreasonably perfect in some essential yet incomprehensible way. Something had been ripped out of him. Some scrap of spirit necessary for existence. Every part of his body labored. Heart slogging, lungs heaving. He felt himself the center of a howling absence.

  To distract himself, he wrote lists. Long lists, this time, comprised chiefly of supposition. His knowledge of the house was limited, but he was certain about the doors—the uglies were able, thanks to their strength, to depress the ridged patches on the walls with their fingers and thus program their destination. Though pointless to do so, he could not keep from speculating on the nature of the place and the apparent infinity of locations to which it was, in some unfathomable way, connected. It was hard to accept that the afterlife possessed an instrumentality. Back when he was a believer, his notion of heaven had been diffuse, his vision of hell informed by comic books. Spindly crags and bleak promontories atop which the greater demons perched, peering into the fires where their minions oversaw the barbecue of souls. The house was at odds with both conceptions, but now he had no choice other than to believe that beyond d
eath lay a limitless and intricate plenum whose character was infinitely various, heavens and hells and everything in-between. It was similar to the Tibetan view—souls attracted to destinations that accorded with what they had cherished in life, be it virtuous or injurious. Unlikely, though, that Tibetan cosmology had any analog to the black house. If he found himself trapped in the house, he thought, he’d study the way the uglies manipulated the doors, then devise a mechanism that would allow him to exert more force when pushing…

  Why had they been afraid of him?

  Reason dictated that they’d presumed him to be dead, and had lost their fear after noticing he was alive and mortally vulnerable. As with everyone else he had met in the house, it took them a while to notice his vitality. But that didn’t explain why they had been afraid when they believed him dead. Perhaps they saw things that people did not. Different wavelengths. Auras. Perhaps they perceived him as a threat, someone who might be able to manipulate the doors. That was self-flattery, but they could have no other cause to fear him. None of which he was aware. Of course if they did know him for a threat, though they weren’t able to kill him, they’d make his life—his afterlife—hell. Punish him. Keep him penned up or too busy to interfere. At least they would try. As primitive as they were, they’d screw up sooner or later and give him an opportunity. But he would have to endure a great deal of torment before the opportunity arose…He understood then that he was not thinking in the abstract, but was contemplating his death. He was, after all, a perfect candidate for the house. He didn’t give a damn about living anymore and like Grace, who’d had Broillard to finish her off, he had his own killers to hand. They would eventually track him down. All he needed to do was wait.