Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

The baby cried again, bawling in terror or pain.

“We have to!” Annette shouted.

Now a woman’s voice came to them through the oak door.

“Please,” it begged.

Annette struggled with her husband, but he kept her back.

“Please, help us. In the name of mercy, I beg you,” the woman’s voice implored. “My baby…Help my baby.”

The child cried again, more pathetically now, ending in an alarming rasp.

“I don’t think you should open it,” Delphine said quietly, too scared to make herself heard even by the priest. She knew she should speak louder, but she couldn’t.

Thomas looked over his shoulder at the priest, who crossed himself and nodded.

“Help my baby…”

Delphine let go of the priest’s hand and moved to grab Thomas’s arm, but she was too late. She watched helplessly as the door opened.

A woman. No, a statue of a woman. With a crown. The Virgin.

Delphine’s heart leapt with gladness that they were saved, and then it sank just as quickly.

And she did wet herself.

The door had opened on a six-foot statue of the Holy Virgin with a high crown, holding a scepter in one hand. But where the Holy Infant should have been cradled in the other, her stone hand held the ankle of an infant who dangled upside down with the purplish skin of a plague victim. He had been dead for some time. Flies buzzed around him. His milky eyes saw nothing. And yet he opened his swollen mouth and cried again.

“Help my baby,” the statue said, its mouth moving jerkily. It ducked its crown and stepped into the room with the sound of a millstone grinding, and everyone recoiled from it. Now it flung the infant at Thomas so hard it knocked him backward. Delphine gaped at it; when it moved, it somehow seemed like a statue seen in glimpses; it moved fast, but choppily. It was impossible.

The fight was awful. It was hard to see in the near-darkness of the candlelit workshop. Delphine shook her head, trying to wake up from what couldn’t be happening; the unholy Virgin had Annette by the arm. The arm broke. It bit something off her face and spat it at Jehan. It stove her head in with its scepter.

God, God, why sweet Annette?

“No!” Delphine tried to scream, but it came out like a kitten’s mew.

The priest pulled Delphine behind him again, saying a Pater Noster , but she looked around his robes; Thomas had flipped his sword, holding it near the point, bludgeoning the living statue, making sparks and chipping it, but he could not stop it. It wanted the woodcarver now. Jehan’s mallet knocked a point off the crown, but then it lowered its head like a bull and gored him against the wall, again and again, shaking the building with the force of it.

A trio of wooden Marys seemed to look on helplessly as a stone version of themselves killed their maker.

Now it was coming for the knight. Thomas, putting his back into a low swing, broke a foot off it, but it dropped to all fours and bit and gored at him, toppling wooden statues, wrecking everything around it. It swept out with the scepter, hitting his leg hard, almost spilling him. He grunted in pain, then lashed down and broke the scepter.

Get the spear.

Delphine ran to the table where the flute-shaped case held the spearhead, and she grabbed it just before the panicked mule kicked the table over, almost on top of her. She opened the case. The priest said her name; she handed him the spear and he understood.

Thomas had broken great pieces off the abomination, but still it kept after him.

Until it saw what the priest held.

It flipped over sideways like an acrobat doing an arch and righted its head, making the priest stop. It grinned at him and black ichor came out of its mouth. It grabbed the dead infant and whipped it around, trying to knock the spear out of Père Matthieu’s hand.

“Touch it!” Delphine yelled now. “It doesn’t want you to touch it!”

The priest stepped forward again.

Thomas swung for all he was worth and caught it square in the face with his sword’s heavy hilt and quillons, breaking the nose from it.

The priest poked at it with the spear, and it scuttled backward out the door.

“I see you,” it said to Delphine, though its stone eyes did not seem to see anything.

She shuddered.

“You didn’t help the baby,” it said, and walked backward into the night.

They had little time to mourn their hosts. The priest yelled, “Fire!” as he noticed one wall of the house smoking, and licking flames spreading from a pile of wood shavings near Jehan’s work desk. One of the candles had landed there when the mule kicked the table over, catching not only the wall but an apron hanging from the corner of the desk. The priest tried to swat out the apron, then tried to swat it against the walls, but only succeeded in stirring the flames to greater activity. Throwing down the apron, he took the mule by its halter and handed it to Thomas, who, with difficulty, led the terrified animal out into the street. The priest now gathered up both the spearhead and its case from the floor, and then he went to Delphine. He had to unmake her fists from where she held strands of Annette’s hair to cry into, but then she allowed herself to be picked up. He took her through the kitchen and out back, put her into the cart, gave her the reliquary, and then unbolted the door that led from the tiny courtyard garden into the street; Thomas had led the beast around and now the priest hitched it up. Thomas ducked back into the house for the rest of his and the priest’s things, then loped up the stairs for Delphine’s sack as she yelled, “Leave it! Hurry!”

Choking black smoke sifted up through the planks of the bedroom floor, but he found her sack and limped down the stairs, past the now-smoldering wooden figures, and through the kitchen. Coughing savagely, his eyes tearing and his face besooted, the knight lifted himself and their goods into the cart.

He patted out with his mailed hand the edge of the priest’s linen robes where they glowed orange and curled, just on the verge of breaking out in flames.

Barely noticing this, Père Matthieu reined the mule, yelling, “Fire! Wake up!” several times for the benefit of any neighbors who might be left alive. They pulled away from the woodcarver’s doomed house and rode into the last of the night, dazed and stinking of smoke.

They looked warily about them all the way, lest some fresh horror come at them from the blackness of an alley. Thomas coughed intermittently, the priest awkwardly slapping his back. Delphine held her spear tightly, distracting herself by singing, while crying:

The only person they saw was a woman who dragged an old man out of her house and sat him by the door; she had trouble propping him up, but finally managed. When she saw the cart, she said, “Take him, please! I’ll pay! I have radishes, you can have them! He was good to me and I want him buried. Please!”

Thomas shook his head at her.

“At least give him last rites! You’re a priest, aren’t you?”

Père Matthieu moaned softly in his throat but fixed his eyes forward.

“Stay in the cart,” Thomas said wearily.

The priest said, “I’m sorry,” too quietly for the woman to hear, and kept the cart moving, even though she followed for a few steps, imploring. The girl, who might have protested, just sang her song again and closed her eyes.

On their way out of the quarter, they passed a church whose stone walls were covered with mold and whose stained-glass windows had been broken out. Deep tracks from all directions pocked the ground around the building, which stank so badly of rot and mold that all of them gagged. The life-sized statue of the Virgin stood by the door, with a bloody, broken crown, a missing foot, and no nose. She held the broken haft of a scepter and cradled the abused form of a child dead of plague.