Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

“The field gate-guard, he had a gun. I risked my life, sir, to get this one for you. Though I must say, she’s a beauty.”

It was torture now, and Kane knew it. Sir Henry thought he would burst if he did not feel the sensuous weight of the sack in his hands. “Come, man. There will be an extra guinea for your trouble.”

“Six.”

“Excuse me?”

“Six guineas, sir. With regret.”

Sir Henry rolled his eyes. The man was a pickpocket as well as a grave robber, but Sir Henry raised his hand and clicked his fingers. The manservant who had been standing by the door, quiet as a shadow, slipped out of the room. He returned a few moments later with a velvet purse, even fatter than usual.

“Your money,” Sir Henry said as he held out the purse with one hand and held out his other for the sack.

“I would appreciate it if you counted it for me, sir, so that I can see it. It’s not that I don’t trust you, sir, but it’s the guild’s rules, as you know.”

Sir Henry gave an exasperated sigh. That damnable guild. Thieves, pickpockets, drug dealers, grave robbers. Sir Henry felt demeaned by the need to work with them, but how else would he procure his darlings? He would have had an assassin kill Kane long ago if he could have found a more amenable lackey to cater to his needs, but none was available. In the sordid graveyard circles he trod, Kane was the best. Besides, do in Kane and one of his brethren would come in the night and slit the throats of everyone in the household. Or perhaps they would choose exposure or blackmail. He was certain the guild had a file on him heavier than this velvet purse.

“Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. That’s fifty pounds, man.” Kane did not reply, but waited patiently as Sir Henry counted out the final six shillings of his bonus. “…Five-and-ten, five-and-eleven, six shillings.” Scowling, Sir Henry held out the purse. “For some men, Kane, that’s a year’s wages.”

“And for some,” Kane retorted, “it’s less than pocket money.” Covered in graveyard dirt as he was, Kane flashed a grin as false as a three-bob bit, then took the purse and stashed it in his coat’s deep inner pocket. As he did so, the light caught the skull-and-crossbones insignia of his damnable guild, tattooed on the web between left thumb and forefinger. Sir Henry grimaced in distaste.

“Kane,” Sir Henry said as the man turned to go. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Grin wider than ever, Kane placed the voluptuously rounded sack in Sir Henry’s hand—a hand that trembled with barely contained excitement.

“Thank you,” Sir Henry said. “You are dismissed.”

Kane bowed. “You know how to reach me should you need me,” he said, and then stepped out of the French doors and into the shadows of the night.

Listening to the crashing of the sea against the cliffs’ sheer drop only yards from the summer house’s large glass doors, Sir Henry waited until Kane disappeared. Then, his hands shaking, he reached into the rough burlap sack and withdrew his prize.

His heart skipped a beat. Even in the jaundiced light of the gas lamp, she was exquisite. The very foundation of beauty lay in his hands. No flesh or sinew or muscle to mar the gorgeous symmetry, the perfection of the skull. Large, round eye sockets, gently curved orbital bones, delicate nasal cavity, slightly pointed chin, brow ridge both smooth and understated. She was the very essence of feminine charm. Scoundrel that he was, Kane had outdone himself. Hands still shaking, Sir Henry returned his prize to the grubby burlap sack. Blowing out the lamp, he exited the summer house, carefully locking it behind him.

As he walked toward the château’s west wing, Sir Henry inhaled the scent of flowering gorse. To his left was the steep drop of the black cliffs, and beyond them the whispering sea where so many ancient sailors had drowned, mourned now only by the cries of gulls. The waters here were notoriously dangerous, as were the old gods who haunted them. Mara, queen of the hungry deep, keeper of the waters’ secrets and of fishermen’s nightmares. Sir Henry smiled grimly. She, too, loved to collect bones.

The studio sat at the end of a long, winding corridor, one of the many maze-like passages in this, the oldest part of the château. Once this great sprawl of buildings and subterranean tunnels had been part of a monastery, but the order had been dissolved in the late Middle Ages when the abbot was accused of sorcery. After that, the lands and buildings were taken over by Sir Henry’s ancestors—an aristocratic but bastard line that some said the abbot had seeded himself.

As he listened to the echo of his footsteps and the distant rumble of the sea, Sir Henry contemplated the abbot’s sad fate. He supposed that the Church just didn’t understand what it meant to live this close to the salt, where life was precarious. But then again, any who had been stationed here long enough began to comprehend the risk. Even a hundred years ago, when the local church’s façade had been restored, they left the mermaid there with her comb and her mirror, and the barnacle-encrusted skulls that encircled the front door. But then again, the workmen had been locals, and forcing them to obliterate such protective charms would have ended in mutiny.

Lifting the ancient iron keyring from his pocket and selecting an unusually ornate key embellished with gold filigree, Sir Henry unlocked the cast-iron gate that separated the studio from the rest of the building. The only other copy of the key belonged to DeMains.

Traversing the short corridor in a few swift steps, Sir Henry knocked on the studio door. A deep baritone voice called, “Enter!” and Sir Henry opened the door. As the hinges squeaked and the ancient oak portal swung inward, the smell of linseed oil and wet clay filled Sir Henry’s nostrils. DeMains was there, as he almost always was. But today he sat at his desk, ink pen in hand, his face bathed in the mellow glow of an oil lamp. No doubt he was expounding on his latest theory about the benefits of flesh-depth measurement.

Glancing up from his work, DeMains smiled. “Sir Henry!” He stood and held out his hand. His fingers were surprisingly long and tapered for such a squarely built fellow. “To what do I owe the honor? I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.”

Sir Henry glanced at the nearby table covered with DeMains’s sculpting tools: micrometer, several levels, piping, and bits of leather and sandpaper. On the far side of it sat a guillotine, a drill, and a bowl full of depth pins. They always made Sir Henry think of miniature golf tees.

“Something special today, DeMains,” Sir Henry said, and then he passed the sack to his resident sculptor. DeMains withdrew the skull.

“My, but she’s a beauty!” With a connoisseur’s touch, he rubbed his fingers along the wide brow and the delicate eye sockets, finally fingering the sutures of the skull. “Not a day over twenty. Where did you get her? The palace cemetery?”

“No. The hangman’s yard.”

DeMains’s eyes widened. “Her crime?”

“Murdering a faithless lover.”

DeMains’s smile spread into a grin as he stroked the girl’s bare cheekbone. “Then we shall give her red hair.”

“According to the police records, it was black.”

“Red for passion,” DeMains replied, and Sir Henry nodded.

“DeMains, you are a consummate artist, capturing the soul as well as the face of beauty.”

“That’s what you pay me for,” DeMains replied, and then quieted for a moment. “On the subject of payment, it’s your forty-ninth birthday next month. On the night of the Summer Solstice.”

Sir Henry tucked his cane into the crook of his arm and sank his hands deep in his suit pockets. “Yes. I’ve been trying not to think about it.”