Jonathan Strahan: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

“There are those who think it’s devil worship,” said Oliver. “And I think they are wrong. But then, one man’s god is another’s devil. Eh?”

He walked into the passageway, and Shadow followed him.

“Such bullshit,” said a woman’s voice. “But you always were a bullshitter, Ollie, you pusillanimous little cock-stain.”

Oliver did not move or react. He said, “She’s here. In the wall. That’s where I left her.” He shone the flashlight at the wall, in the short passageway into the side of the hill. He inspected the drystone wall carefully, as if he were looking for a place he recognized, then he made a little grunting noise of recognition. Oliver took out a compact metal tool from his pocket, reached as high as he could and levered out one little rock with it. Then he began to pull rocks out from the wall, in a set sequence, each rock opening a space to allow another to be removed, alternating large rocks and small.

“Give me a hand. Come on.”

Shadow knew what he was going to see behind the wall, but he pulled out the rocks, placed them down on the ground, one by one.

There was a smell, which intensified as the hole grew bigger, a stink of old rot and mold. It smelled like meat sandwiches gone bad. Shadow saw her face first, and he barely knew it as a face: the cheeks were sunken, the eyes gone, the skin now dark and leathery, and if there were freckles they were impossible to make out; but the hair was Cassie Burglass’s hair, short and black, and in the LED light, he could see that the dead thing wore an olivegreen sweater, and the blue jeans were her blue jeans.

“It’s funny. I knew she was still here,” said Oliver. “But I still had to see her. With all your talk. I had to see it. To prove she was still here.”

“Kill him,” said the woman’s voice. “Hit him with a rock, Shadow. He killed me. Now he’s going to kill you.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Shadow asked.

“Well, yes, obviously,” said the little man, in his sensible voice. “I mean, you know about Cassie. And once you’re gone, I can just finally forget about the whole thing, once and for all.”

“Forget?”

“Forgive and forget. But it’s hard. It’s not easy to forgive myself, but I’m sure I can forget. There. I think there’s enough room for you to get in there now, if you squeeze.”

Shadow looked down at the little man. “Out of interest,” he said, curious, “how are you going to make me get in there? You don’t have a gun on you. And, Ollie, I’m twice your size. You know, I could just break your neck.”

“I’m not a stupid man,” said Oliver. “I’m not a bad man, either. I’m not a terribly well man, but that’s neither here nor there, really. I mean, I did what I did because I was jealous, not because I was ill. But I wouldn’t have come up here alone. You see, this is the temple of the Black Dog. These places were the first temples. Before the stonehenges and the standing stones, they were waiting and they were worshipped, and sacrificed to, and feared, and placated. The black shucks and the barghests, the padfoots and the wish hounds. They were here and they remain on guard.”

“Hit him with a rock,” said Cassie’s voice. “Hit him now, Shadow, please .”

The passage they stood in went a little way into the hillside, a man-made cave with drystone walls. It did not look like an ancient temple. It did not look like a gateway to hell. The predawn sky framed Oliver. In his gentle, unfailingly polite voice, he said, “He is in me. And I am in him.”

The black dog filled the doorway, blocking the way to the world outside, and, Shadow knew, whatever it was, it was no true dog. Its eyes actually glowed, with a luminescence that reminded Shadow of rotting sea-creatures. It was to a wolf, in scale and in menace, what a tiger is to a lynx: pure carnivore, a creature made of danger and threat. It stood taller than Oliver and it stared at Shadow, and it growled, a rumbling deep in its chest. Then it sprang.

Shadow raised his arm to protect his throat, and the creature sank its teeth into his flesh, just below the elbow. The pain was excruciating. He knew he should fight back, but he was falling to his knees, and he was screaming, unable to think clearly, unable to focus on anything except his fear that the creature was going to use him for food, fear it was crushing the bone of his forearm.

On some deep level he suspected that the fear was being created by the dog: that he, Shadow, was not cripplingly afraid like that. Not really. But it did not matter. When the creature released Shadow’s arm, he was weeping and his whole body was shaking.

Oliver said, “Get in there, Shadow. Through the gap in the wall. Quickly, now. Or I’ll have him chew off your face.”

Shadow’s arm was bleeding, but he got up and squeezed through the gap into the darkness without arguing. If he stayed out there, with the beast, he would die soon, and die in pain. He knew that with as much certainty as he knew that the sun would rise tomorrow.

“Well, yes,” said Cassie’s voice in his head. “It’s going to rise. But unless you get your shit together you are never going to see it.”

There was barely space for him and Cassie’s body in the cavity behind the wall. He had seen the expression of pain and fury on her face, like the face of the cat in the glass box, and then he knew she, too, had been entombed here while alive.

Oliver picked up a rock from the ground, and placed it onto the wall, in the gap. “My own theory,” he said, hefting a second rock and putting it into position, “is that it is the prehistoric dire wolf. But it is bigger than ever the dire wolf was. Perhaps it is the monster of our dreams, when we huddled in caves. Perhaps it was simply a wolf, but we were smaller, little hominids who could never run fast enough to get away.”

Shadow leaned against the rock face behind him. He squeezed his left arm with his right hand to try to stop the bleeding. “This is Wod’s Hill,” said Shadow. “And that’s Wod’s dog. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“It doesn’t matter.” More stones were placed on stones.

“Ollie,” said Shadow. “The beast is going to kill you. It’s already inside you. It’s not a good thing.”

“Old Shuck’s not going to hurt me. Old Shuck loves me. Cassie’s in the wall,” said Oliver, and he dropped a rock on top of the others with a crash. “Now you are in the wall with her. Nobody’s waiting for you. Nobody’s going to come looking for you. Nobody is going to cry for you. Nobody’s going to miss you.”

There were, Shadow knew, although he could never have told a soul how he knew, three of them, not two, in that tiny space. There was Cassie Burglass, there in body (rotted and dried and still stinking of decay) and there in soul, and there was also something else, something that twined about his legs, and then butted gently at his injured hand. A voice spoke to him, from somewhere close. He knew that voice, although the accent was unfamiliar.

It was the voice that a cat would speak in, if a cat were a woman: expressive, dark, musical. The voice said, You should not be here, Shadow. You have to stop, and you must take action. You are letting the rest of the world make your decisions for you.

Shadow said aloud, “That’s not entirely fair, Bast.”

“You have to be quiet,” said Oliver, gently. “I mean it.” The stones of the wall were being replaced rapidly and efficiently. Already they were up to Shadow’s chest.

Mr. No? Sweet thing, you really have no idea. No idea who you are or what you are or what that means. If he walls you up in here to die in this hill, this temple will stand forever – and whatever hodgepodge of belief these locals have will work for them and will make magic. But the sun will still go down on them, and all the skies will be gray. All things will mourn, and they will not know what they are mourning for. The world will be worse – for people, for cats, for the remembered, for the forgotten. You have died and you have returned. You matter, Shadow, and you must not meet your death here, a sad sacrifice hidden in a hillside.