A. Hartley - Will Power

She pressed the handle until it clicked dully, then she pulled the heavy door, its timbers dragging, wide open. Inside, though the tunnel was about the same size as the one we’d just come through, it seemed tighter, more restricted. The air had a dusty staleness that you could smell through the damp, and where the walls had formerly been plain, they were now lined with doors, each no more than a few feet square and set at waist height. They were made of some hard, reddish lumber designed to resist decay, though few had after all these centuries. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of them, and where the portal timbers had crumbled or been eaten away by worms, you could see the black, arched hollows where the corpses lay.

The place smelled of death. Not death like in a butcher’s shop, all caked blood and internal organs, or the stench of decay like a rat left out in the sun, but ancient and forgotten like the world the people buried here had inhabited. It smelled of age and all the time that had gone by since their passing. Some of the bodies had monuments carved into their sepulchers and the corridor around them swelled into a kind of vault, others were marked only by a line of indecipherable script. We inched along the passage, Renthrette, for all her earlier casualness, slowing as if awed by a sense of dread or sadness. And around us, stacked and arrayed in their decayed finery, lay the dead.

The tunnel ended abruptly in a tight spiral staircase that wound upward.

“We must have missed it,” I said, suddenly afraid for reasons I couldn’t say. I began to bustle about in the low and shifting lamplight, scanning the various tombs with growing alarm. “It must be here,” I muttered into the stillness. “We must have passed it.”

“What are we looking for?” said Renthrette, calm and quiet.

“A mausoleum with a figure of a warrior carved into a pillar: life-size. Tough to miss, you’d think.”

“We’ve seen a lot of tombs.”

“But have we seen that tomb?” I hissed, my patience beginning to strain. The place-the silent and forgotten passage with its corpses arranged rank upon rank-was beginning to get to me.

“How would I know?” she returned.

“Brilliant,” I remarked. “So we’re stuck here.”

“If worse comes to worst we’ll go back the way we came,” Renthrette answered with a reasonableness that sounded labored. It was getting to her, too, however much she pretended otherwise.

“What if we can’t?” I barked. It suddenly seemed more likely that we would be locked in, that we would be entombed here forever. The idea chilled me to the bone.

“We have to get out,” said Renthrette, urgent.

“We can’t,” I replied, suddenly quite sure. “We’re going to be walled up with the dead. We’ll never get out. . ”

“Stop it, Will,” said Renthrette, slapping her hands over her ears. “Don’t say that. There’s something trying to stop us, distracting us. The dead are confusing us.”

For a moment I thought she was right, but then it hit me.

“No,” I said, suddenly clear and moving away from her. “It’s not the dead. But something is trying to stop us. We must keep looking.”

“Why must you?” said a voice.

I turned hurriedly and found myself looking at Garnet. He was coming down the corridor toward us, armed for battle. Renthrette ran to meet him.

“Garnet! Thank God,” she cried. “We have to let Lisha and the others in. I’ll explain it all later.”

“I already know,” he said, smiling. “I have spoken to them and they sent me to you. Come back this way.”

He started to move back the way we had come, and Renthrette took a step toward him.

“No!” I shouted. “Renthrette, wait. That’s not your brother.”

She shot him a quick look and then called back to me, half laughing as she did so. “Of course it is. Who else could it be?”

“Look at him closely,” I answered, walking quickly toward them. “Make sure.”

She glanced at him, but only for a second. “Of course it’s him,” she said.

“Come,” he said, extending his hand to her.

“No!” I bellowed, breaking into a run.

She took his offered hand and he began to draw her back and up. She moved with him, easily, and as she turned from me, I had the distinct impression that she had forgotten my presence utterly. I called after them, but they did not turn or answer. I ran and, rounding a corner, saw where a black hollow had appeared in the rock wall: a tomb door, gaping open. Only yards from it, Garnet and Renthrette paced arm in arm. The oil lamp lay shattered and sputtering on the ground and Renthrette’s posture seemed limp, as if she were drunk.

The tomb they now stood before was little more than a vertical coffin carved into the rock. To my horror, Garnet slid his back against the wall and into the recess, drawing Renthrette after him. I shouted and flung myself at them. Garnet’s free hand caught my wrist, but now I saw it for what it was: a fleshless, bony claw.

It began to pull me in.

I tried to tear it away but some greater strength was guiding it, giving power to its dusty, fleshless bones, and in moments we were all three pulled in a horrible embrace into the tomb. The corpse which had taken on Garnet’s form released Renthrette, whose eyes were cloudy and sightless, and used that free hand to reach for the stone slab which was the sarcophagus lid. I kicked and flailed as best I could but the skeleton hand now had me firmly by the shoulder and its grip was like a vise. Renthrette was muttering to herself like one on the edge of sleep, and the door, the great stone slab that would entomb us, was shutting out the light. I stopped fighting, knowing that since Renthrette’s illusion was giving the thing power, only she could stop it.

I called her name. “Look at him, Renthrette!” I cried. “Look at your brother.”

Her eyelids flickered and opened for a second. They rested on the skull beside her face and she smiled.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Garnet. Now rest.”

“No,” I shouted, as the tomb door inched further across the opening, “it isn’t him. He’s different.”

“No,” she murmured, her eyes still shut. “No.”

“How did he find us?” I tried, desperate now. “How did he know we were here? He says he spoke to Lisha: Where? When? How could he have found them and why would he have gone looking? He didn’t know they were here. Lisha is outside the city and couldn’t have come to him. He must be lying. Renthrette, it’s not your brother . Look.”

Her eyelids rippled again and confusion crossed her forehead as the last of the lamplight was closed out of the tomb. In the last second before the darkness took us, her eyes opened all the way; she saw the hollow eye sockets, yellow and gnawed by rats; and she screamed.

In that instant the grip which seized me broke, the finger bones shattered, and the tomb door quavered and fell slowly into the passageway, crashing full length and breaking upon the flint floor with a deafening roar that seemed to resound through the earth. I staggered out after it, gasping the air, and Renthrette followed, shrieking and brushing at the torn limb which had encircled her. The rest of the corpse seemed to stand for a second and then tumbled in pieces, many of the bones turning to powder before they hit the ground.

Renthrette sank back against the opposite wall, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth and her eyes fixed on the empty tomb. She was wheezing, rather than sobbing.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It wasn’t him.”

For a while she said nothing, so I sat down beside her and slipped my arm around her shoulders. I had, after all, seen this little trick before. She didn’t rebuff me, or react at all, for that matter. She just sat there, breathing heavily and biting into the back of her wrist till the print of her teeth showed bone white.