The green hand dropped down into Richard"s sight, pressing toward the chest of the thing named Brother Skene. The hand stopped an inch above him and wavered, as if pressed against a gla.s.s so polished it could not be seen.
"So weak the charm," she said. "But enough."
Richard pulled against the weight on his eyes and managed to look at her. She was as before: made of night silk. The light from the lantern he had set beside the pit never touched her. Her face, which must have been lovely at one time, flitted between corpse light and Stygian dark.
Richard asked: "What do you want with him?"
The spectral hand turned, seeming to float without a limb attached to it. As the fingers pointed upward, Richard felt the icy river around him again, stinging his eyes and filling his lungs.
"Go back ... to the beginning ...."
As the fingers curved upward, Richard"s body followed. The ice water released him and spume hurled him into the air. He spun toward the bridge above, a woman"s dress with stains of blood flapping at the edge of his sight. The stone child hiding its eyes came closer.
Then he was on the bridge ... moving through Regensburg, as if he were running backwards ... pa.s.sing through alleys of a city he had never seen ... through winter markets and past the unfinished Cathedral ... through iron doors into an abbey.
The hand pressed down; he followed the memory. Her memory.
Down he ran, into a cell with no windows. Brother Skene stood there. Young now, with mad l.u.s.t in his eyes and a flail in his hand.
The hand brushed away the vision. "You do not wish to know more."
Richard shook his head to answer the question and to push away the savage crime he almost had to witness.
He rubbed his eyes, and the woman was no longer standing over the body. But Richard felt that she was behind him, taking on her other form that he was afraid to look on. Something sc.r.a.ped on a shelf. Metal scratched against stone and then the object clattered to the floor. It landed at his feet; light glinted off a dagger"s blade.
He picked it up. It was then that Richard Davey, a curiosity seeker but also a man of modest bravery, understood what the letters on the door had asked him to do.
He spoke to the shadows. "I can"t. I have never harmed anyone in my life."
No answer came except a sibilant hissing.
He held the dagger hilt with both hands. In the blade, he saw his face. It seemed so childish, young and foolish, the way he had felt when he stood alone on the road with his hands up in the air.
"I cannot do it," he repeated.
The corpse-lit hand unfolded from the dark and gripped the back of his hand. The shock of fur touched his neck.
"He is their charm." The voice was in his ears, a purring that formed words. "They make him live ... so I cannot have them. When the Devil has him ... then I may repay them all."
The hand bent Richard"s wrist, pointing the tip of the dagger toward Brother Skene"s breast. The spectral hand could go no further than a finger"s width above the monk"s body but it would be enough, more than enough, to drive the knife into flesh and whatever blood remained in the untimely thing.
"No, no!" His body shook, but he could not move his limbs. A horrible, smothering fur twisted around him, wrapping his body like a tomb shroud.
"Shall I tell you all of what he did to me?"
The dagger lowered. Richard"s muscles fought, but only his arm seemed able to obey and it was not strong enough.
"They still call it ... an indiscretion."
The dagger point pressed over the ugly cross ... brushed across a b.u.t.ton ... nicked at the red fabric at the collar ... Brother Skene"s throat lay bare, a ruffle of breath moving it.
Suddenly, three hands were clasped onto the dagger. Richard"s grip on the hilt was pressed between the moon glow of the woman and a withered claw that had struck from inside the pit like an adder.
Richard screamed. He couldn"t help himself. The hand of the near-dead thing in the sarcophagus was a touch of maggots. The eyes of Brother Skene, filling the sockets with black, stared at him. They opened onto a soul that had hovered a hands-breath above h.e.l.l for over two hundred years.
The force of the two hands pressing against the dagger was so strong that Richard feared his wrist would snap. Smothered from one side, pressed toward a living corpse, he prayed that he might simply go mad and be free.
"Maleficas non patieris vivere!"
Another light burst into the room, coming from a single candle. The ghost hand vanished, and Richard was almost thrown into the wall from the force of Brother Skene"s arm.
He had a second to see Abbot Fletcher in the doorway of the vault a candle in one hand and a garish cross in the other, his mouth twisted with cries of exorcism before all light in the room was choked.
The last image left on Richard"s eyes was of claws reaching toward the abbot. The darkness of the cat had filled the room. She bristled her midnight fur and consumed the chamber with her fury.
The abbot was somewhere in the folds of the avenging creature, but it still could not touch him. The abbot"s voice shouted protections, s.n.a.t.c.hes of rituals both white and black, and the screeching of the cat as it tried to reach him was a chorus of frustration and fury.
The abbot shouted in German, "You are powerless against us! Go back! Go back to h.e.l.l!"
Richard"s wrist was burning, but the dagger was still in his fingers. He tried to stand, wondering if he could grope toward the door through the cat"s shadow and flee the abbey. His curiosity was finished for the night.
Suddenly, hands like a torturer"s iron clamps snapped around Richard"s neck and pushed him into the shelf, shattering vials. Brother Skene did not need light to guide him.
The cat hissed throughout the vault, "Now will you kill him?"
Richard felt life squeezed from him and was thankful that he did not have to look into the oily pools of Brother Skene"s eyes as he was throttled to death. All he could see were glowing spots as he lost consciousness and dropped into endless night.
They must have tossed him into a pauper"s grave. No coffin, not even a pine box. He felt the weight of bare earth on his chest. But then his eyelids fluttered and opened. It was still dark, but his body felt room to move. He tried to roll and the weight slid off him. As it dropped away, light reached his eyes.
The lantern glowed from the edge of the vat where he had left it. Beside him was a body in red robes. A dagger stuck up from where the heart should be. The falling weight of Brother Skene had driven in the knifepoint as he had strangled Richard. All that remained of the monk was a dust outline and a few bones rising through the gaps in the robes. He had finally dropped the last hand"s-breadth to h.e.l.l.
But Brother Skene looked more pleasant than the remains of Abbot Fletcher. The cat"s claws left nothing behind that even the most hardened undertaker would wish to bury. Once the charm of the undying man on the floor was gone, the rage of his victim was worse than anything that Richard, an imaginative man, would have imagined.
He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the lantern and climbed the stairs. He followed the clawed prints stamped in blood. He did not need to lift the tapestry; it was ripped from the wall and crumpled on the ground.
He walked through the chapel. It was the fastest way out, although he feared what he might find there. He walked quickly through the nave with his head turned away from the apse. He got only a few blinks of the red ruins of the rest of the Benedictine Abbey of St. James. They had paid for keeping a sinner so long from the Devil"s grip.
It was still the deep of night when he stumbled outside, but the sky had cleared. He stepped past the gate. The moment his foot touched the road, he sat down in the dirt to wait for her.
She flowed from the eaves of the beeches, still a thing of midnight. But the green of her skin had flushed red. She was more beautiful that way, fulfilled in her wrath.
"You could not drive the knife in yourself." The words came easily now. Hate no longer held onto her.
Richard nodded. "You are the Devil."
"Only a servant." The redness began to fade. ""Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord." But that is a lie. The Devil may also repay, when he has been falsely accused and long denied. Some men do not need the Devil to make them do what they do. What they have done."
Her eyes was this the first time he had seen them? were filled with sorrow but not for what had just happened.
Richard looked toward the open doors of the church. The scent of blood wafted from it. "Revenge should be cleaner."
Her eyes were on her own body. "The crime was unclean. Yet, I was no maiden at the time. And I took my own life. G.o.d would not have me, but the Devil welcomed me. He welcomed revenge. It is repaid. And you are still clean."
Richard Davey did not feel that way. But he was the weapon that did not want to be drawn. The sword did not have the guilt of its wielder, no matter what the blood said.
She spoke: "At dawn, it is finished for me. But I have a reward for you."
From behind, pa.s.sing through her body to reach him, trotted a familiar horse with bulging saddlebags. Richard stood up and placed his hand onto the animal"s forelock.
"The thieves they did not get far."
It was the last sound he heard from her. When he turned to ask what she meant, he saw only the orange glow of the dawn.
As he mounted the saddle, he tried not to look at the claw marks that crossed the leather, or the bloodstains on the animal"s hoofs. He turned in the direction Regensburg. He did not enjoy the thought of crossing its bridge and the icy waters below.
Ryan Harvey has crossed the Regensburg Bridge and seen much of Bavaria (thanks to his sister living there), but has spent most of his life in Los Angeles, where he resides with an ever-growing and s.p.a.ce-gobbling collection of books and Blu-rays. He is a recent winner of The Writers of the Future Contest, and his winning entry, "An Acolyte of Black Spires", is collected in L. Ron Hubbard Presents: Writers of the Future Vol. XXVII. He has worked as a columnist for Black Gate magazine"s website for three years and has two upcoming stories in the print edition. His fiction will also appear later this year in the anthology, Roar of the Crowd (Rogue Blades Press). Aside from writing, Ryan is a pulp literature nut, avid swing dancer, and wearer of 1930s fashions in LA"s vintage scene. His Latin is far better than his German.
Lovers & Desire.
"O what a black, dark hill is yon, "That looks so dark to me?"
"O it is the hill of h.e.l.l," he said, "Where you and I shall be."
The Daemon Lover, Popular English Ballad.
Obsessions (or Biting Off More Than One Can Chew).
By Colleen Anderson.
Dream, dream divine, my dear
of dark"s loving, sheltered clasp
immortal hopes in mortal sleep
gaslit vapours drape, shape
the land restless
with its secrets
lurid phantoms shift within
a discordant haze of consumption and gambled lives
hollow hooves ring cobblestones
turn and there is nothing