Tom Piccirilli - A Lower Deep

I held out my hand and said, "Dad?" My father bit me.

My blood dripped into the pool of Bridgett's blood on the ground. It was my will that coursed here, my resolution and no one else's. Nice thinking , Self said, but are you sure you know what you're doing?

Let's hope so.

I am. I do.

I called forward what I needed. My father guffawed and capered around the tombs. Thummim sat on his head and spun around with him. The sweet scent of maleficia and rage filled the crypt, and in the House of DeLancre I could hear the walking corpses shrieking in fear.

Far too late Jebediah cried, "Wait . . . !"

The doorway to the altar filled with shadow.

And standing before us, smiling in all his sadistic eminence once again, strumming his lute and covered in snow, and with his hatred for witches and family as tangible as the six hundred people he'd once sent to the stake, stood the perverted witch killer Pierre DeLancre.

Self said, Pierre, my man, lookin' dapper. Play us a new tune. Something with a backbeat.

The witch-hunter had learned from the progeny that had enslaved him all these centuries. He played his lute and all the raped and slain women from the Basque danced to his melodies once more: they remained his captives as much as he was theirs. I shied from his evil, not just the depravity from which he'd climbed, but what had come along with him. Spirits crammed the crypts, so many of Jebediah's line that he sought his face in all of them. The dead governor had followed Pierre from the mansion and now swung arm in arm with my father to deranged ballads. The tombs filled stuffed to bursting with the horrors of Jebediah's family.

As Pierre approached, Jebediah whimpered, "No."

I'd have to say that the boy is seriously pissed.

"Stop the Fetch, Jebediah," I told him. "Release Danielle and my father, and I'll send Pierre on his way."

His jagged lips crawled. "And you called me a maniac.

All those wicked thoughts and feelings caged within Pierre DeLancre these hundreds of years now roiled in his burning eyes. For a face that hadn't grinned in centuries his mouth now parted in a distorted smile to show black teeth. The skin of his face snapped and ripped because it had grown so taut over time.

Only one word escaped him, with the fury and lovingly obsessive passion that had made him a legend across history. His vicious, psychotic laughter rolled crazily in the back of his throat until finally he spat. "Witches!"

Even as his master I shivered at that voice. Jebediah grew nearly as pale as Gawain, his scars standing out like flames. He wasn't only scared of Pierre's vengeance but also of all those demented souls of his ancestors. What confessions might they drag from him?

Those dead ancestors that Pierre DeLancre carried on his back wheeled and flowed across the crypt and pummeled Jebediah. They'd watched him, they knew him, and they were privy to every secret and failure and fear. The House railed and roared with iniquity and cruel humor. No guilt was beyond their grasp, no hidden dread could remain concealed. Jebediah might enjoy confronting his victims, and might even delight in defying God, but his own family surrounding him now simply reminded him too much of himself.

Who's brave enough to face that?

Self curled around my throat, waiting for the action to really get going, with a witch-killer on the loose again. C'mon, Pierre, let's clean it up once and for all!

Jebediah handled it better than I would've thought. He held out for another few moments, the cold sweat streaming from his forehead as they approached. His muscles tensed and he wet his ragged lips with the tip of his tongue. His burn scars darkened.

"Get rid of them!" he cried. "The Fetch is off! Iblees will mark your step no longer."

"Let go of Danielle and my father."

"I can't."

"Then screw off."

"I can't! Our destinies are too snarled. Take your father with you if you like, he doesn't amuse me anymore. But Dam must stay. She's a part of us. And no matter how much you argue the fact you know I'm not lying to you."

Pierre DeLancre, killer of hundreds of witches, turned to look at me, and his eyes were crammed full of hatred. He didn't want to go anywhere. Pierre and his ladies drifted back a step and then another, unfurling as time took its natural course, and he faded to dust in the midst of all the women of the Basque he'd raped, who now stamped on his ashes and cursed me.

We could find our gods and even speak to them if they weren't too deaf or indifferent; we could hide inside our greatest joys and successes, but no matter how much time went by or how much blood ran we could never extricate ourselves from our own dead pasts.

"Betrayer," he said.

"Now that's a good one."

I backhanded him and he smacked me and I backhanded him to the floor. Despite all our power, all the deaths and dreams having already cut us to pieces, it still only came down to two men slapping the hell out of each other.

He raised his bloody face and struggled, like Christ. "Oimelc, the Feast of Lights sabbat, is in six weeks. You'll be back."

"No, I won't, Jebediah."

"We'll be waiting for you, our Master Summoner. The breath of God has already shown you the way and the truth."

"We make our own truth. That's why you're so sick." I scrawled fire before Gawain's face and said, "You can come along if you want, Gawain." He looked at me as if I were an even bigger fool than my father. Thummim waved to my second self, black tears dribbling down her coarse face, but that mouth still tilted into a knowing smile.

Jebediah leaned heavily against Danielle's tomb and spun away, dismissing me without even a gesture. "In six weeks, then."

I left the tombs and walked to the northeast of the covenstead, working through the thickets on a downhill grade past the pine and sage as my father stumbled along behind me. I grabbed a handful of snow and tried to wash his face, only to realize that the black-and-white harlequin paint was actually a mystical tattoo. It would take me a long time to get rid of it, if I could at all. We stared at each other and he leered and made nipping motions.

Deep in the woods I finally ran out of steam, dropped to my knees, and bawled like a baby. I kept wishing my father were here to comfort me as the fool clicked his heels and tittered. He'd once tried to save me, and for his failure this was his reward. I wasn't certain if I'd be able to steal what remained of his life, especially now in the midst of so much killing and resurrection.

He broke for the brush laughing and kept going on farther into the forest. I ran after him for a time and eventually allowed him to go on alone. Perhaps he'd be more free this way, untied from both me and Jebediah.

Snow burned with the opening light of dawn as I fought through the heavy brush and broke onto the path leading toward the church.

I wouldn't be back.

I wouldn't.

Self yawned and said, So what are we going to do in the meantime?

Cliffs rose sheeted in ice that glared red as the dust of Masada.

At the top of the mount stood a place of massive triumphs and torments, where blood on the rock never faded. Culled from fervor and faith, MountArmon ascends snowcapped and glinting in the coming dusk, hard and undying as the martyr's soul. There are holes in history that can't be filled, eons occasionally still muttering, and gaps into which the restless can be drawn or pushed, straining empty-handed toward ritual and the hope of redemption.

Magee Wails is only made an island by the gorges surrounding the mount and the forked river that converges into JamesLake a quarter mile below the towers of the monastery. Those who dwell there are the damned but perhaps not the doomed. This river has baptized ten thousand, and drowned ten thousand more. Within memory there have been hurricane seasons when hordes of escaping rats rode the swollen corpses downstream, as they did the early Christians in the sewers of Rome.