Tad Williams - A Stark And Wormy Knight

That didn’t sound good at all. “After?”

“Yeah. Chest cracked and sewn up again. Skull sawed open. Veins full of embalming fluid.”

“Jesus. That’s nasty.”

“Imagine how the guy felt who’d just done the sewing.”

“And you’re sure the coroner’s not in on some body-selling scam?”

“Kind of a stupidly vivid story to tell if you don’t want to attract attention, don’t you think?”

I had to concede that one. “Okay, so the kid goes to Monk’s Point lighthouse on a dare, dies standing up, then walks off the autopsy table and runs away. Weird. Anything else?”

“Oh, yeah. You see, I was already doing research as soon as I heard about the boy being found dead. I didn’t know him, but I thought it might make an interesting wire service piece — you know, ‘Old ghost story haunts modern murder’…”

“Old ghost story?”

“Like I said, everybody’s scared of this place, and it turns out there’s good reason. A lot of weird stuff’s happened there and in the area just around it, going back as far as I can research, everything from noise complaints to murders, old ghost stories and local kid’s rhymes and other odd stuff, even some UFO sightings. It kind of goes in cycles, some years almost nothing, other years things happening a few times a month. It began to remind me of some of the places you told me about back in San Francisco, when we were working on, y’know…”

“I know,” I growled. “Don’t remind me.” I took out a cigar. “You mind?”

“Go ahead.” Albie got up and opened the window.

I could hear the frogs outside kicking up their evening fuss, and, dimly, the sound of seabirds. “I think I want to have a look at the place close up.”

I stood in front of the gate. The lighthouse was nothing much more than a big dark line blocking the stars like paint. “I think I’m going to have a look around. You were going to tell me something about the guy who owns the place.”

Bayless pulled his jacket a bit tighter. It was cold for the time of year. “Grayson Thursday. It’s been in his family for a long time. He’s hard to get hold of, but he’s supposed to see us the day after tomorrow.”

“Good enough,” I said. “See you in the morning.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?” He looked upset, but I didn’t know whether it was because he was scared for me or he’d been looking forward to the company. “What if you’re not back in the morning?”

“Tell the children that Daddy died a hero.” I ground out my cigar on the gravel driveway, then vaulted over the gate. “See ya, Albie.”

The local real estate market wasn’t losing anything by having the Monk’s Point property in the hands of one family. It was kind of butt-ugly, to tell the truth. As I came around the headland so I could see the buildings properly, my first thought was, So what? There really wasn’t much to it — the lighthouse, plain and white as vanilla, and a big, three-story barnlike structure with a few other outbuildings pushed up against it like they were all huddled together against the hilltop wind. Still, my feelings from earlier hadn’t changed: something about the place, as subtle as a trick of light or angle of land, made it easy not to like. In the dark it had a thin, rotten sheen like fungus.

I stopped on the pathway in front of the barnlike building’s front door, figuring this must be where the kid had ended up. I looked around carefully, but couldn’t see anything that was going to stop someone’s heart. The front door was locked, but the pockets of my coat were full of remedies for a problem like that, and a few moments later I was inside, swinging a flashlight around.

If this Thursday guy and his family had hung on to the house for a while, it looked like it was mainly to keep their old junk. It was like some weird flea market, with the stuffed heads of deer and other wild animals on the wall, with dozens of other examples of the taxidermist’s art in glass cases or stands all over the huge front room, even a stuffed Kodiak bear looming almost ten feet high on its hind legs. The shelves were piled with books and curios, an old pipe organ stood against one wall, and a grandfather clock the size of a phone booth stood against another. Some of the junk actually looked kind of interesting and I strolled around picking things up at random — a model sailing ship, a conch shell the size of a tuba, some giant South American beetles that had been preserved and posed and dressed like a mariachi band. Three quarters of an hour or so passed as I wandered in and out of the various rooms, some of which seemed to have been dormitory rooms for the monastery, all of which seemed to have the same kitschy decorator as downstairs, as though the place had been planned as a museum but never opened. I even walked up the winding stairs of the lighthouse itself, which was as bare as the rest of the place was cluttered. It didn’t look like the beacon had been lit in recorded memory — the wires had been torn out, the big lamp removed. I took the long walk back down.

I looked at my watch. A little after eleven. I sat on an overstuffed chair that didn’t cramp my tail too badly, switched off my flashlight, and settled in to wait.

I may have dozed off. The first thing I noticed was a glow in the high windows, a sickly, pale gleam, pulsing slowly. It took me a moment to realize what it was — above my head the lighthouse had smoldered into a sort of weird half-life. I started across the room, but before I got to the foot of the stairs I heard a strange, rustling sound, as though a flock of birds was nesting in the high rafters. I stopped. The noises were getting louder, not just rustles but creaks, crackles, pops and snaps, as if the room was a bowl full of cereal and someone had just poured the milk.

I swung my flashlight around. A stuffed seagull on a stand meant to look like a dock piling was stretching its wings, glaring at me. The deer-head on the wall behind it was straining to get loose, rattling and bumping its wooden plaque against the wall. Something moved beside me and I snatched my hand back. It was a replica of a Spanish galleon, its sails inflating and deflating like an agitated blowfish.

“Oh, this is just CRAP!” I said.

Outside the windows the green light was still dim but the pulses were becoming more rapid and the whole room was growing more wrong by the moment — the air had gone icy cold and smelled harsh and strange, scents I had no name for. I took a few steps back and something broke on the other side of the room with a splintering crash, then a huge shape came thumping and stumbling out of the shadows. It was the stuffed bear, walking like a stiff-legged drunk, swinging its clawed arms as it went.

“You must be kidding me,” I said, but the thing wasn’t answering. It wasn’t even alive, just moving. One of its glass eyes had popped out, leaving behind a hole full of dangling straw. I stared at this for a half a second too long and the thing caught me on the side of the head with one of those swinging paws. It might have been stuffed, but it felt like it was poured full of wet cement. It knocked me halfway across the room and I’m no feather. Something other than the latest improvements in taxidermy were definitely going on, but I didn’t really have time to think about it too much, since the giant bear was on top of me and trying to rip my head off my neck. It felt like it weighed about twice as much as a real bear, and trying to throw it off was already making me tired. I dragged out my pistol and shoved it up against the furry belly.

I emptied the gun into it. “No picnic basket for YOU, Yogi!” I shouted. BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! No soap. The thing just kept bashing me. Trying to shoot a stuffed bear — stupid, stupid, stupid.