Frank Tuttle - Dead Man's rain

We all held our breath. Mama’s hex showed me faces in the walls but was quiet while Abad and his crossbow-fancying friend passed.

We waited until the sound of their passage and the last faint glow from the lamp they carried was gone, and then I took the widow’s hand and we darted down the stairs. She moved well, and the soft-soled shoes she’d chosen were as quiet as my socks. And at least her customary black garb let her blend in well with the shadows.

At the foot of the stairs, I listened, heard only cries and moans. I led the widow to the shadowed alcove by the stairs and motioned for her to be still.

“Jefrey,” I whispered, and pointed toward the door to his closet. “Wait.”

I went, Petey at my side, ghostly dancers twirling about me. Blink they were there-blink again, gone. I put my ear to the door.

“I cannot, no, I cannot.”

Petey growled.

“Quiet,” I hissed. Then I heard Jefrey snore, and I opened the door.

While I gathered him up, I pondered my next move. It seemed simple enough-just sneak out the front and wake the Watch. The storm would hide us. Once away, we’d be impossible to find. With luck, they’d not know we were gone until the Watch came and told them.

I slung Jefrey over my shoulder and stepped back out into the ballroom and blinked away the phantom dancers about the time a crossbow clicked and sent a bolt all the way through my left arm, just above the elbow.

The widow shrieked and thunder boomed, loud enough to rattle windows. I dropped Jefrey and went down on one knee, trying to find the man in the shadows so I’d know which way to run.

Lightning flared and I found him, crouched in the dark on the other side of the staircase, five steps from the widow.

He lowered the crossbow, grinned, pulled out a long knife. He shouted something to his friends, but it was lost in the thunder.

Petey snarled. I’d heard that same snarl only half a dozen times, down in the tunnels. It was pure wolf, pure rage, sudden promise of a torn throat, of a leap and a bite and a wet red gush of blood.

The man heard it too. He heard it and he whirled, seeking its source, and a sudden rush of shadows broke from my side and threw itself full upon him.

He fell. He flailed and kicked for a moment, long knife whipping and slashing and striking sparks off the tiles.

I rose. Blood ran down my arm, kept running, and I could feel it rush out new with each heartbeat. But I rose and stumbled toward the man, halfway there before I realized my own knife was gone, dropped, probably under Jefrey and too damned far away.

The widow stepped out of the shadows, a red-on-yellow Hang fish-urn in her hands. Without ceremony, she lifted it high above her head and hurled it down upon the man still wrestling emptiness on the floor at her feet.

He rolled. She missed. The urn shattered, and the man cursed and rolled and caught her right knee with his hand. The widow screamed and kicked him hard in the face.

I leaped. He hadn’t seen me coming. Lightning cracked and burned, just past the stained-glass windows set high up in the walls, turning the floor red and green and a dark royal blue. I had just enough light to land a punch hard in his throat and shove my right knee hard into his groin as I fell. He gasped and I hit him again and then the widow pressed a long thin knife in my right hand and I buried the narrow blade deep in his throat.

He gurgled and went still. The widow pulled me up. The sharp end of the bolt stuck out of my arm, flopping loose, but at least it hadn’t lodged in the bone. Then I saw the blood begin to pool at my feet, felt the giddiness that comes as harbinger to shock.

“Got to get this wrapped up,” I said. “Got to get out.”

The widow bit her lip. Then she reached out and snatched the bolt free from my flesh.

I nearly passed out. She propped me up and took off her scarf and tied it tight around the wound.

“Get up, boy,” said a voice. The widow heard it too.

“Get up. You ain’t done yet.”

Behind us, Jefrey groaned and stirred. I blinked back tears, began to hear music again-though this time, it was a funeral dirge.

“Got to get out,” I said. I rose, managed to step over the dead man and take up his blade. “Got to go.”

The widow rushed to Jefrey’s side. She had him sitting up when I got there, and he even tried to open his eyes. But he wasn’t walking, and I wasn’t carrying him.

Shouts sounded, up the stairs, and I saw the flash of a lamp.

We took Jefrey between us and stumbled away. I steered us toward House Merlat’s tall, wide doors, but then I heard a warning growl beneath the thunder and saw dark shapes mass in the shadows ahead.

The widow halted. “See!” she hissed.

I squinted, looked. There-was that light? Down the hall, past the doors?

“This way,” cried Elizabet. “Check the closets!”

I cursed. The door was that way. The door and the lawn and the Watch-but we’d never beat Elizabet there, and whoever might be with her.

The widow yanked us around. “This way,” she said, panting under the burden of Jefrey’s weight and my own growing weakness. “There’s a safe-room.”

“I cannot,” wailed the voice, through Mama’s hex. “I cannot, please, please, no.”

Footsteps sounded, behind the light.

We went. I tried to remember hallways, tried to place windows and turnings and ways. Was there a sitting room to the right, with windows that might be opened? Where was the hall that led to the pantry?

But Mama’s hex filled the darkness with faces, and as my arm began to throb in earnest, my head seemed to swell and grow light. I could smell Petey’s wet musk, feel his breath hot and moist at my knees. I heard mourners cry amid the music now, and as we passed down yet another hall, it seemed that we merely joined a line of weeping shades already bound for the faint, faint light at the end of a long, cold tunnel. They shuffled and they moaned as they walked, and just as I realized I was moaning softly with them, Petey reached up and bit my hand.

I jumped and pulled the sagging Jefrey up so that his knees no longer dragged on the floor.

“In here,” said the widow. She let Jefrey go, fumbled with the latch and key. And then the door opened with a groan, and Jefrey and I fell inside.

“What is this place?” I asked. “Is there another door?”

“There they are!” shouted Elizabet, from down the hall. Someone answered, though who it was and what they said was lost to the thunder. “Wait, Mother!” she shouted. “There’s someone here I want you to meet!”

The widow heaved the door shut. More clicks and throws sounded in the dark, and after a moment I heard a crossbar being dropped.

Blows sounded on the door. “Oh, do come out, Mother,” shouted Elizabet from the other side. “Don’t be an old bore! Isn’t Daddy waiting for you, just outside? Haven’t you seen him, calling for you?”

The widow didn’t reply. I heard her fumble in the dark, open a drawer and lit a match.

I looked about. The room was maybe ten-by-twenty, no windows, one door. The walls and floor were plain, smooth stone, bare and unadorned. The ceiling was of banded iron. The only door, the one the widow had just barred, was also fashioned of old banded iron.

Chairs lined one wall. A dusty cask sat in a corner. I was betting it was dry and empty.

“Safe,” chuckled the voices. I groaned and let myself sink to the floor.

The pounding on the door ceased. “I’ll be back soon with the others, Mother,” said Elizabet. “I’ll bet Roger has a chisel in his bag. You’ll like Roger, Mother. He’s such a dear. I doubt he’ll even hurt you much, before he breaks your neck.”

Then she laughed, and the room fell silent.