Tales of the Old World (73 page)

“Daddy!” She flung open the heavy wooden door and burst inside. Magretta, the
house maid, sprang up from her place on Freda’s father’s knee, her cheeks
burning. The old man himself also seemed a little flushed.

But Freda didn’t care if they both had the flu. She just wanted to be with
her daddy. With a leap she flung herself into his arms.

“What is it?” he asked, his tone a kaleidoscope of embarrassment, anger and
concern. “Nightmares?” He stroked her hair, feeling the sweat that had turned
her beautiful mane of golden hair into dank rats’ tails.

“You’re trembling,” he said.

“It was the thing in the cupboard again,” she whined, clinging to him.

He exchanged a glance with Magretta and shrugged. “Oh,” her father said, and
sighed. “Well, let’s go and have a look, then.”

“No!”

“Yes. It’s just your imagination.”

Taking the lantern from the table, he swung her onto his hip and carried her
back upstairs. He grimaced a little at her weight. She seemed to be getting
bigger by the day now, and he was no longer a young man. But Freda was oblivious
to the effort the climb cost him. She stared into the shadows ahead, her
expression as grim as a convict climbing the gallows.

“Look,” her father said, lifting the lantern to chase the shadows back behind
the tumbled mess of her bed. “No monsters.”

“The cupboard,” she whispered, edging around behind him.

With a grunt, he lowered her to the floor and walked over to the twin
mahogany doors. He opened them with a theatrical flourish. Inside a wall of
hanging clothes hid the camphor wood rear of the cupboard, and for a moment he
thought about pulling them aside and pretending to find something behind them.
But, with the suspicion that such a joke might backfire and the knowledge that
Magretta was waiting for him downstairs, he decided against it.

“There, you see?” he said. “Just clothes. Very pretty clothes for a very
pretty girl. And perhaps some mice, but you’re too big to be scared of little
mice, aren’t you?”

Freda nodded doubtfully.

“Good girl. Now, hop into bed. I’ll leave the lamp and send Magretta up to
check on you later.”

“Why not now?”

“Because she’s, ah, busy.”

With a little sigh, Freda climbed back into her bed. At least he was leaving
her the light. Daddy lent down and kissed her on the forehead, his whiskers
tickling her skin, then he turned and left her, closing the door behind him as
she pulled the blankets up to her chin.

The thing in the cupboard waited until he had returned to his study before it
started scratching again. It was soft but insistent, like the throbbing of a
rotten tooth, but this time she fought against the fear. The lamp helped. Even
though Daddy had turned it down it still bathed the room in a warm light that
somehow seemed to hold the noise at bay.

“It’s just mice,” she whispered to herself as the scratching was replaced by
a series of sharp, crunching sounds.

“Shoo!” she said loudly. To her immense relief, the noises stopped.

“You’re just mice,” she told the cupboard triumphantly. She raised her head
farther up out of the eiderdown, like an archer peeing over a castle wall. The
sweet, glorious silence remained unbroken and a sense of triumph began to steal
over her.

For a while she savoured her triumph and drifted off towards sleep. It was
almost a shame that she had frightened the mice away. They were funny and sweet.
And she always impressed daddy by being such a brave girl when they appeared.
Not like silly Magretta who screamed and jumped onto chairs. Maybe tomorrow
night she would leave out some cheese and see if…

The cupboard door swung silently open. Freda stopped breathing.

“Daddy must have left the latch off,” she told herself. “He must have.”

But before she could finish the thought, the monsters rushed out. There
weren’t just one of them but two, four, a dozen. They swarmed over Freda in a
single great mass, their filthy, black hair scratching her smooth skin, their
jagged claws gripping her arms and legs like sprung steel rat traps. Freda,
almost insane with terror, opened her mouth to scream, to vomit out this
paralyzing horror, but a slimy paw thrust itself into her mouth. She gagged at
the taste of the rotten skin and was choking as they bound her with thongs of
rough leather.

And all the while, the lamp burned upon the table, it’s light still and even.
The monsters had stirred no more breeze than they had noise. Their tails
thrashed excitedly above their writhing bodies like scaly whips.

Within seconds their work was done and they left as noiselessly as they had
arrived, slipping through the hole they had so painstakingly chewed through the
back of Freda’s cupboard.

So it was, that when Magretta came to check on her a few hours later, all
that remained of the little girl was a torn scrap of her nightdress: an
embroidered rabbit torn in two.

The shrine was so old that it looked more like a thing grown than a thing
built. Centuries of winter storms and harvest suns had rounded off the sharp
edges of its masonry, leaving its granite bulk as smooth and featureless as a
river washed boulder.

The centuries had blanketed the shrine with ivy, the greenery growing as
thick as an old man’s beard. Within its rustling depths were many families of
birds, the creatures living out their entire span amongst the foliage. In ages
past, some of the shrine’s keepers had scoured the ivy from the walls because of
them. Perhaps they had feared that those whom they were sworn to protect might
be disturbed by the constant irreverence of the birdsong.

But the present incumbent had no such delusions. The dead, he knew, were
dead. It would take more than a few chattering sparrows to disturb their sleep.

Besides, he liked to watch the birds flitting about the graveyard. Some of
them had even grown enough trust to perch on his hunched shoulders as he worked.
They’d watch with cocked heads as he chopped wood, drew water, scythed down the
grass that poked up like green fingers from between the graves that huddled
around the shrine.

And they did huddle, these graves, clustering around the ancient building
like lambs around an ewe, nervous lambs that could smell the scent of a wolf. It
was a fanciful notion, but the shrine’s keeper knew it to be an accurate one.
The black depths of the forest that lay beyond his walls were alive with those
who sought to enslave the dead. Kings and citadels had fallen beneath the
onslaught of these abominations. Armies had been slaughtered. Great walls
crumbled to dust.

Yet where they had fallen the shrine had stood, the neatly trimmed hedges
that enclosed it remaining inviolate. Morr, after all, was a powerful god.

The shrine’s keeper smiled contentedly at the thought and decided that he’d
worked enough for one day. He stood up, pressed his bony thumbs into the knots
that had formed in his back and returned to his chamber. There he swapped his
scythe for a jug of water, a crust of bread and a handful of small, wrinkled
apples.

He sat on one of the gravestones as he ate and watched the sun setting over
the forest. He enjoyed the sight as he munched his way through the fruit and
scattered his bread to the birds that had flocked to his side. In the light of
the setting sun their plumage shone and their shadows were dagger sharp. The
priest found himself smiling again.

Despite the pain and the suffering, this world was a beautiful place. It was
understandable that some men clung to it in defiance of their preordained span.
Unforgivable, but understandable.

With a sigh, the old man glanced down at the liver spots on the back of his
hands, the mottled skin there as creased as last month’s apples.

“It won’t be long before Morr greets me,” he told one of his fluttering
friends. As if in silent confirmation, the sun dipped below the horizon and the
breeze turned chilly.

As day turned to night, the priest dispersed the last of his bread and
hobbled back to the shrine.

He’d been dreaming of wide, open grassland, an ocean of green, above which
clouds as big as galleys sailed lazily past. In the distance, an old limestone
wall stretched across the horizon. Sun-gilded lichen covered every inch of it,
except for the single oak door. As he approached, the wood started to shake with
the impact of a hard knocking. The sound was as loud as thunder and as
relentiess as a funeral bell. It was also absolutely terrifying.

All the same, the keeper ground his teeth together and carried on marching
towards the shaking door. A second later he was stood in front of it. His
fingers closed around the handle and he pulled, swinging it effortlessly open to
reveal…

With a suffocated scream the old man sat bolt upright on his cot, his skin
washed with sweat and his bony chest heaving as he gasped for air.

Wide eyed in the darkness of his chamber, he ran his fingertips against the
rough stone of the wall. He pulled the covers back and swung his feet onto the
floor. The tiles were cold, cold enough to send a welcome chill of reality
through his befuddled thoughts.

With a long, shuddering breath, he shook off the last scraps of the dream and
ran a trembling hand across the damp skin of his scalp.

Although the dream had gone, the knocking continued. For a moment the priest
sat and listened to it, as it rattled against his door with a desperate, knuckle
scraping urgency. There was a mute terror in the sound, as though the visitor
was living in a nightmare of his own and for a split second the shrine’s keeper
considered ignoring the summons. But he extinguished that traitorous thought as
soon as it appeared. Above all things, he was a priest of Morr. It was his duty
to make sure that the dying didn’t slip away unshriven, and after sixty years of
service his duty was as much a part of him as his bones.

Another volley of impacts rang out. Clenching his jaw, the keeper got
painfully to his feet and stumbled blindly over towards the cell’s ancient
fireplace.

“Have a second’s patience,” he called out to his unwelcome guest as he knelt
down, knees popping, in front of the fire’s charred remains. “I’m making light.”

The knocking paused for a moment. Then it started again with a renewed
urgency.

“Wait,” the priest snapped, then drew in a deep breath and blew. Ash flurried
up into the darkness like grey snow, revealing glowing embers beneath. “I’m
coming.”

The priest, ignoring a sudden fit of dizziness, took another breath and blew
again. This time a tiny flame burst into life amongst the fire’s remains. After
the darkness of the unlit cell, the light was painfully bright and the priest
wiped a tear from his eye as he fed the fire with tinder.

Only when the fireplace was once more crackling did he turn to the door.
Suppressing an edgy sense of déjà vu, he made himself walk over to it and lifted
the bar.

He closed his fingers around the latch and pulled, swinging it effortlessly
open to reveal…

Without a word of warning the door was slammed backwards in a rush of
movement and cold night air. Even as the tortured hinges squeaked in protest, a
huge figure, shapeless and shadowed in the flaring firelight, burst into the
room. The guttering flame revealed it to be a hideous confusion of feathers, and
furs and wild, staring eyes.

The shrine’s keeper moved with a speed that would have amazed his
parishioners. Leaping back as easily as a man half his age, he seized the scythe
from its place in the corner. Hefting its bulk upon his bony hip he turned,
ready to throw his weight beneath the sweep of the blade. But before he could,
the apparition swept the bedraggled mass of felt and feathers off of its head
and bowed stiffly, chin to chest in the northern manner.

The priest recovered his wits quickly as he studied the man who stood before
him. “Come in,” he said, his voice level with a soothing calm that he’d
practiced on generations of grieving relatives. “Take a seat.”

His guest watched him return the scythe to its corner. Beneath the filth
encrusted mop of his hair and the singed remains of his beard, his face was
deathly pale and hard with suspicion. Only when satisfied that the priest wasn’t
going to attack him did he look away, his eyes flitting about the bare walls of
the cell, as though he expected them to spring open in some trap.

“Here, take a seat by the fire,” the priest repeated, hastening to bar the
door against the quickening wind. But when he turned around, the man was still
in the centre of the room, sniffing the air suspiciously.

The priest sniffed too and immediately wished that he hadn’t. The filth that
stained his guest’s rags also greased the air with a foul, sickly sweet stench.
The odour had great intensity and reminded the old man of some of his riper
charges.

None but a lunatic could live with such an odour, the priest decided
unhappily. Then, as cautious as a man testing the heat of a stove he placed a
hand on the madman’s shoulder and steered him towards a stool.

“We’ll take a drink,” he said soothingly. “Then you can tell me what brings
you here.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the foul smelling stranger grunted his agreement
and slung something from his back. At first the priest had taken it to be a
beggar’s bedroll, but now he could see that it was a weapon.

At least he assumed that it was a weapon. What else could it be? The great
polished lump of stained timber that served as a stock looked to belong to a
crossbow, its smooth curves designed to rest easily against a man’s shoulder. On
the top of this familiar shape, though, taking the place of the crossbows arms,
there was nothing but a simple barrel of blue steel. As long and as thick as a
man’s thigh it glinted dangerously in the firelight, its muzzle flared open in a
toothless snarl.

It had a strange smell, too. An acrid, sulphur smell that was even sharp
enough to cut through the rank stench of its owner.