Robert Duperre - The Gate 2 - 13 Tales of Isolation and Despair

Jules dropped the body with a splash and brushed the long, dark mop of his hair from his eyes.

How far had he walked? A mile? Maybe, maybe not—that corpse was damn heavy. But it seemed like it had been a mile, and he was soaked to the bone. His wet leather clothes were heavy and growing more and more uncomfortable with every step he took.

“This is ridiculous.” He reached down, searching in the dark for Gilbert’s body. Something appeared before him. He wasn’t certain what he was seeing, something shining in a sliver of light. His hands found water as he knelt down, but no Gilbert. Jules reached out as far as he could without leaving the place he’d been when he set down the body, calling out, “Where are you?”

He splashed forward, feeling around for anything that resembled his mangled victim.

“Gilbert!” He took a few steps to the right. “Wick is going to kill me—” he muttered just before he slipped.

There was no ground beneath his feet. His face raked over a rocky embankment as he fell. He was pulled underwater, sucked down into a fierce undertow into pitch blackness, and then propelled forward. His body twirled end over end as he fought the current.

In a panic he swallowed dirty water. He slammed into something hard and rocky.

Jules resurfaced, gasping for breath and clawing the murky water. He was in the canal. He must’ve walked right over the edge and fallen in. And with the storm, the undertow was driving him north at a furious rate. The idea of the canal emptying out into the Azez Sea did not sit well with him. That was much deeper water, and he wasn’t certain he’d have the strength to swim back to shore if the current took him there. He was going to have to gather his wits and get to one of the banks. That was his only chance.

Regaining his bearings, now feeling certain that he must be in the canal and moving steadily toward Lockenwood, he cried out for help. Unfortunately, he didn’t see the tower, which sat right on the edge of the Avon. What he saw were objects on one side of him that he didn’t recognize—tall silhouettes against a dark gray skyline as he was swept past, still gasping for breath, trying to control his spinning in the rough, rapid torrent.

“Help!” His voice faltered. He was knocked into something large and solid that seemed to be in motion under the water as well. His legs tangled up in it for a moment, and then he drifted past it. Jules didn’t have time to think about how badly his leg had been twisted as he slammed up against a hard, flat surface and then pushed up into some sort of wooden furniture, maybe a desk. It pressed him up against a tall, heavy object that crushed against his body as the current forced him along.

Jules felt himself spiraling. Then the back of his head smacked into the sharp edge of a building.

He groaned, reached for his wounded skull, and felt the slick, smooth side of the desk pound his face into the building again.

Confused, the assassin slid down into the rushing water. For a moment he was nothing more than a leather-clad rag doll, limp and washed away by the current, his long, dark hair twisting and swimming about him like ink. He buffeted against boulders and gasped for breath, filling his lungs with the tide.

His eyes wide and panicked, he pushed off a large rock beneath him. Breaking the surface, he managed to cling to another desk or table that had been somehow swept into the canal.

In the darkness he could make out the shape of a heavy, square sort of structure. Every so often a stone peaked out of the wash. He began to realize that he hadn’t fallen into the canal, and he hadn’t gone past the Association tower. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t going north at all. If he had been, he would’ve reached the sea by now. No. Somehow he must have slid into a ravine and gotten caught up in a flash flood.

The desk he’d been riding bashed into a sandstone peak and turned sideways, then it cracked open and a bloated white corpse slid out, once more knocking Jules under the waves.

The assassin tried to dislodge himself from the corpse, but the crook of its arm had become entangled with the hilt of the dagger on his belt, pulling him along under the water, deeper and deeper.

He unsheathed his dagger, freed himself from the body, and popped up to the surface once more. He slammed against a large structure. His face was sore and bleeding. Still fighting the current, he desperately grasped the wrought iron bars of the edifice’s only visible window. His legs were being pulled in one direction as he clung to the bars and attempted to climb up.

A bouquet of dead flowers brushed against him and was swept away.

He glanced up at the sky. The rain beat down into his eyes. Lightning flashed, and for one brief moment he saw clearly the upturned wooden boxes that floated past him, as well as the construction he clung go.

A cemetery. He was drowning in a cemetery. Those weren’t desks that he had been riding on the current, but coffins, the building he clung to a mausoleum. And then he saw, as lightning ripped open the sky overhead, the peaks of grave markers sticking out of the onrushing water. Stone shafts dotted his vision, and here and there were various wooden caskets, broken and leaking bodily fluids into the bath.

Jules scrambled to get a foothold in the tiny, false window of the tomb. His legs were like wet noodles, and they went out even as he forced them to continue to support his frame.

He slid back down the rough yet slick face of the tomb, gasping as a sharp pain shot up his leg. He fell back down into the water, trembling, clutching one iron bar possessively. The assassin now dangled by just that one hand, up to his mouth in the floodwaters again.

A dead woman’s hair streamed across his face as her corpse brushed against him.

In a panic he tore at the hair, clumps coming off in his fingers, and then lost his grip on the mausoleum.

“No!”

He was swept along with the dead body that, to his horror, seemed to be enveloping him. Tendrils of hair were everywhere, long and black and in his eyes. He thought of Wick, of her long red hair, her porcelain skin, her blue eyes, her young, lithe body. He was going to die here in this flood, in this graveyard, somewhere outside of a backwater like Plunyport. This was supposed to have been a simple thing. An easy job. Kill some ridiculous jailer and get gone.

He spat out the noxious deluge and grabbed onto an obelisk, wrapping his arms and legs around it as if it were a parent he never wanted to lose. The dead woman was still draped around him. She was newly dead, no longer bloated but covered with slime.

For a moment it seemed that he would be able to hold on. He braced himself against the unending tide as it wore him down. He cursed the name Gilbert Marklegrove .

The dead thing still attached to him was becoming cumbersome. He needed to pry it off, lighten his load. He squeezed his eyes shut, willed himself to let go with one hand, wiped the hair off of his neck, and forced the head down into the water. Then he let go of the marker with his legs and was nearly pulled away by the current.

“Gods!” He grasped for the top of the obelisk again.

The corpse slipped off of him and sped away on the current.

Jules fought to pull his legs in, to wrap them back around the marker, but he just didn’t have the strength.

Several panicked farm animals swept past him, tumbling against the headstones and coffins and disappearing into the darkness.

As lightning flashed again, he saw the demolished remnants of a barn coming toward him. The side smashed against the mausoleum, a portion of fence knocking into his hands, but he held tight. Then the barn’s frame loomed overhead. It creaked as it crumpled against the menagerie of rocks, snapping and shifting and coming down on top of him.