Frank Tuttle - Hold The Dark

I’d only gotten through it twice when I heard the driver mutter a curse and the carriage rocked as his friend scrambled up onto his seat. The ponies shuffled their hooves when he caught up the reins.

Evis and a pair of halfdead were just entering the yellow ring of lantern light. Evis’s clothes were torn and stained and ragged. His hat was gone, and his jacket hung in tatters. His pale skin, like that of his companions, was stained and spotted with the dark black blood of the thing from under the floor.

Evis and another halfdead supported a third between them. I squinted, recognized the limp, injured vampire as Sara, the one who’d tried to take me outside.

It was only in that light, with her jacket gone, that I realized Sara had once been a woman. She’d been halfdead so long it was hard to tell, since they all wear their hair short, and she’d perhaps been tall and thin before she changed. Now her head lolled, and her arms twitched spasmodically, and though she moved her feet she did little more than shuffle them across the cobbles while Evis and the other halfdead hauled her toward the carriage. Evis and his upright companion looked grim. Sara, too, was slathered in old black blood-but a wound in her chest, right over her heart, oozed and glistened with blood of her own.

I pushed myself back out of the way. Evis said something to the driver, and suddenly Sara and the other vampire scrambled inside.

Evis popped his head in the door.

“Bertram will take you home, Mr. Markhat,” he said. “You and I must speak tomorrow, the sooner the better.” He lifted his hand, cutting off my reply. “There is no time. You must not be seen here, and I must stay. Go. We talk tomorrow.”

He shut the door, and the carriage rolled on.

An awkward silence fell. Sara shifted and mumbled and pawed the air with her hands, as if caught in a deep and troubled sleep. Her companion held her close and tried to hold her hands and stroke her face and keep her from leaping out of her seat. He didn’t have enough hands, and even vampire-quick was nearly not quick enough, but he managed, somehow.

She cried out, high and airy, and he began to speak to her, soothing and soft. And only then did it dawn on me-Sara and her companion were married.

Had to be. Mister and Missus Halfdead. Death had done them, but they had yet to part. I’d missed the mannerisms before because I never imagined such pale cold creatures would bother with wives or sires.

She cried out again, flailed the air with her hands. Three of the fingers on her right hand were broken, bent back double, touching the back of her palm.

“Will she heal?”

Sara’s husband-had to be-turned his eyes briefly upon me.

He spoke. His accent wasn’t Rannish, and it was so thick it took me a moment to work out his words.

“What do you care?”

Sara’s broken fingers began to move, drawing themselves slowly back into their normal places. I could hear, faint over the rattle and clack of the carriage, the faint scraping and popping of small bones.

“She saved my life. She fought for me.” I shrugged. “So did you. It matters.”

He held her good hand while the broken fingers twitched and jerked.

“She will recover,” he said, when it was done. Sara sagged like a rag doll, and her husband looked back toward her. “We fought for the House. Not for you.”

“Then I thank the House,” I said.

Sara expelled a final whimper, doubled her hands over the wound in her breast and nestled close to her mate.

Light from a rare lit streetlamp washed through the open windows of the carriage. I saw a wetness in the male vampire’s yellow eyes, and I looked quickly away.

After a while, Sara began to mumble again. She shared her husband’s accent, and she wasn’t speaking Kingdom, but the older tongue of the Church. I know maybe a dozen words of Church, so I wasn’t keeping up too well. But I didn’t need a priest-book to know halfdead Sara was mumbling ragged prayers.

“Mercy, mercy, spare me, mercy.” Over and over again. And while she prayed, her fingers moved, reflexively rubbing a prayer coin that wasn’t there, wouldn’t ever be there again.

Mercy, mercy. I wondered what old Father Molo would say, on hearing vampire prayers. I could almost see his red mask shaking, hear the fury and outrage in his tremulous old voice. Blasphemy, he’d shout. Blasphemy, and damnation quick to follow.

Still, Sara prayed. She’d grappled fully with the thing we’d disturbed. She touched its flesh, perhaps tasted its blood. Was that the mercy for which she prayed? Was that the fate from which she begged to be spared?

Life ends in death-perhaps half-life ends with the thing from the floor.

So she prayed. I lowered my head and closed my eyes. For the first time since before the War, I mouthed Sara’s name and prayed for her too, all the long way back to Cambrit.

I shucked my clothes right there in the street. I managed to salvage my socks and my shoes, but everything else went into a trash bin-even my old Army dress pants, which had withstood assaults of time and moths and weather and war, but wasn’t ever going to recover from a couple quarts of old dead blood and smeared-on bits of rot.

Naked at my door. If the neighbors were watching I’d never hear the end of it. But I wasn’t done yet. Inside, I gathered my just filled washing urn, a cake of Mama’s flesh-eating lye soap and a rag destined to keep my britches company in the bin.

Then, still nude, I stepped back outside and lathered up Mama’s soap and took the longest, most disgusting bath of my long and sordid life.

I got lye soap in one eye and provided high amusement for a pair of passing ogres. I’ll probably go bald any day now from the caustic soap, but when I was done I was shivering and shaking and absolutely squeaky clean.

Only then did I dress. Only then did I lock the door, open a warm bottle of Bottit’s and sit down to see if I’d shake.

I didn’t. I didn’t sleep, not until nearly sunrise, but I didn’t have the shakes again.

I even did some thinking. Came to some conclusions. Conclusions about Evis and Houses and why Avalante wanted Martha Hoobin home and safe and sound before anyone but finder Markhat discovered a mad, rotted halfdead napping in a shallow grave downtown.

Three-leg Cat poked his head in the office but refused to come near me. I finally dozed off, still at my desk, to the sound of half a dozen dogs outside snarling and tearing at my blood-fouled clothes.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

I jumped, spilled warm beer and felt my head begin to throb.

Mama’s voice rang out. She tried the latch, cussed and shoved hard at the door.

I threw the bottle in the trash bucket and managed to get out of my chair and to the door before Mama broke it down.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” I said, fumbling with the latch. The daylight through my bubbled-glass door-pane was faint and yellow, more blush of dawn than actual morning.

I yanked the door open. “Damn, Mama, it’s barely daylight-”

She pushed her way in beside me. The look on her face-it’s never a good look, mind you-was worried and grim and if I didn’t know her better I’d say it was frantic.

“Boy,” she said, huffing and puffing. “Boy, where you been?”

I shut the door.

“Right here sleeping. Why? Where’s the fire?”

She fell heavily into my client’s chair, her hands tight around the neck of that big burlap sack she sometimes carries. Once she let a little snake crawl out of it and get loose on my desk. I’d told her to leave it at her place from then on.

“You ain’t been here all night.” She opened the bag and started rummaging around inside it as she spoke, and I got that lifted-hair-on-the-back-of-my-neck feeling I’d always gotten when the Army sorcerer corps had aimed new hexes at us troops.