Arcane II (25 page)

The Inquisitor lifted a bowl to my lips. I drank.

“I’ll let you have a quick and painless death if you tell me where it is. I laud your bravery but how much more can you withstand? ”

“And make Timothy’s murder worth your while?” My words were a garbled whisper.

I wanted to let go and float free into the long corridor of light that led out of the darkness.

“The bells are for Columba,” he said. Her name drew me back.

“You can’t fake another miracle.”

“We don’t need to. People are hungry to believe. The crowd is huge. All people need is inspiration. The church will feast on Timothy’s bones for centuries to come. His head’s reliquary is being fashioned from ivory.”

“She’s just a girl.”

“Where’s Lambert’s purse?”

“The west gate. The watchtower. There’s a loose stone on floor, just beneath the arrow slit.” There hadn’t been time to hide it elsewhere.

He nodded. His minion went to fetch it. When they returned there was the click of stones in the Inquisitor’s satisfied fingers.

“Let her go. Please.”

“I take no pleasure in this. Events are already in motion. Father Sebastian’s holding Mass. The petitioner is a silk merchant from London. His wife can’t have a child.”

Father Sebastian would be at the altar, the congregation at his back. The wafer and wine. The flesh and blood.

“Please. Spare her. No one need know.”

“Bring him out.” The Inquisitor got up from his chair. “Dump his body in the bog.”

“He’s still alive.” That was one of his men.

The Inquisitor thought on this.

“I do this, Thomas, because you’re a worthy man.”

He flicked a blade against my neck and opened a vein. Blood collected in the hollow above my collarbone and ran down my chest when they hauled me up. They redressed me in my habit, the fabric rough against my raw skin.

My feet trailed behind me, then thudded on the steps as they dragged me up. Two others were behind me. They were to fetch Columba.

The path to the cart took us past the applicants’ cells. I could hear the chants of Mass. Everyone would be there. The Inquisitor walked ahead of us, the key to her cell in his hand. I imagined Columba as she always was when I opened her door, sat on her cot with her legs folded beneath her.

“Let me see her.”

“Why not?”

My blood had soaked through my habit.

He put the key in the lock and turned it. The men let go of me and I pitched forward against the door as it swung inwards.

I regretted my life of selfishness. I’d abandoned my family. I’d lived for books, not people. I regretted that I’d not loved God as He would want. I regretted the children killed as I looked the other way.

Please God, cast me into hell. I’d endure the torment of the night a million times over, but save her.

I beg you, Lord, spare her.

My head nodded and my life ebbed. No time, not even enough time to see her.

The Inquisitor had fallen to his knees.

Columba’s cell was filled with the muscular flurry of wings that exploded outwards, knocking me to the floor. Pink legs. Black dots for eyes. Open tails, like fans. The tiny plumes at the neck. Feathers, overlapped. Each one was perfect. Whiter than parchment. Whiter than saints’ bones. As white as Columba.

We are carried upwards on the wings of doves.

We are carried on the wings of angels.

What It Means to Love

Andrew Bourelle

Michael walked through the milky fog with his shotgun raised. He could see only gray and could hear only his own breathing, amplified inside his gas mask. He checked to make sure Ashley was still behind him. Even though she was only a few paces back, she was barely more than a phantom silhouette in the fog. Her rifle was slung over her shoulder and her head was down. She labored to move, burdened by her bulging belly.

When they emerged from the fog, relief came over him, as it always did. The creatures didn’t only dwell in the mists, but the fog hadn’t existed back when the world was what it had been. Back when Michael was an accountant and Ashley a schoolteacher. Back when cities were lit by electricity, computers linked every home, cellular telephone towers carried the voices of humans in the air across the globe. When the Event happened—global earthquakes rending crevasses deep into the earth—the patches of fog had appeared and so had the monsters. Since then, Michael and Ashley had associated the mists with danger, with growls and screams, with friends vanishing in the whiteness.

When they were sufficiently far from the last tendrils of fog, they surveyed the land around them. They were on a hill that gave them a clear view of a broad valley. Mountains were in the distance, snowcapped, but the valley they walked through was vast, with fields of weeds where crops once grew and small copses of trees here and there. Ashley pointed, and Michael acknowledged that he saw it too. A house, perhaps a mile away, stood at the end of a dirt road that meandered through the fields.

“We might as well check it out,” Michael said.

They began to walk in that direction. The season was autumn, and the air was brisk but not cold. The trees that lined the fences were changing color, turning red and yellow. The scene before them, with the farmhouse and the fields, was like a landscape painting unless one looked closely to see that the fields were no longer farmed, that weeds had grown up around the farm equipment, that most of the windows in the house were boarded up or broken out.

Michael pulled off his gas mask, and Ashley followed his lead. The fog occurred most places they went, just patches of it, sometimes no more than a few feet, sometimes as large as a few miles around. It didn’t matter if the temperature was one hundred degrees or zero, the patches existed, thick and white, more like smoke than evaporated water, but with no odor. Michael didn’t know what the fog was, didn’t trust it, and that is why they avoided the patches if they could and wore the gas masks when they couldn’t. Ever since all of this started, he’d always taken extreme precautions, determined to keep himself and Ashley alive. But he didn’t know for sure that the air was any more dangerous inside the fog than out. After what had happened to Ashley, he didn’t know if there was
any
way to be safe in this world.

***

He kicked open the door of the house and entered, shotgun ready at his shoulder. He lit the dark house with a headlamp and walked through like a policeman ready for an ambush. He noticed the floorboards in the living room were torn up, as if something had burst from the floor. He shined the light down in the hole to see a crawlspace filled with gravel. He decided to make sure the rest of the house was clear before he checked the hole further. Ashley waited outside, keeping watch, her rifle at the ready. The sun was setting.

“Come inside,” Michael said.

He stood at the edge of the hole, looking down. It was ten or twelve feet wide. Without the lamp, they couldn’t see the bottom in the fading light.

“The rest of the house is clear,” he said. “Keep an eye out while I go down.”

Without waiting for a response, he jumped in. It wasn’t a far drop, only five or six feet. He knelt and slowly turned, pointing his light and his shotgun into the dark chambers around him, making a full circle. The joists and block foundation hid parts of the crawlspace from him, so he crawled inside and explored for several minutes. He found at the back of the house a small hole through the block wall, no bigger than the thickness of a baseball bat, as if some creature the size of a snake or a rodent had burrowed through. He knew what had happened now, or had a good idea. Something small had come into the crawlspace, just a larva perhaps, and there it had grown to its full size before exploding out onto whoever had taken refuge in the home.

“All clear,” he said, laying his shotgun on the floor at her feet before boosting himself up and out.

She stayed in the house as he explored the rest of the property: the barn, a tool shed, two grain silos. When he was satisfied, he returned and found that she’d already gone through the cabinets looking for food. She found none. The house had already been picked clean by scavengers. The furniture had been smashed for firewood, likely burnt in the large brick fireplace that stood like a gravestone over the hole in the living room floor. The clothes in the closets had been taken. They could find no clues as to what happened to the people who’d lived there. Not even bones were left behind.

“Can we have a fire?” Ashley asked.

“Let’s wait and see what the night is like.”

She knew what he meant because this was his typical response. If it was a cloudy night and vision was obscured, they could have a fire. But if the sky was clear, and the stars and moon lit the landscape, then the smoke from the chimney would be visible. They didn’t want anyone—or anything—to see that they were here.

They ate from cans without warming the food. The labels had long since been torn off, so it was always a surprise what they would get each meal. Tonight, they split a can of beef stew and another of peaches.

“Maybe we can stay here a few days,” Michael said. “Maybe I can shoot a deer.”

“That would be nice,” Ashley said.

Michael could see that she wanted a fire, that she was tired of sleeping in the cold with no comfort. He started pulling up floorboards, using the hammer he kept in his backpack. He piled the boards next to the fireplace and made a cursory inspection of the sky before lighting the fire. The sky was mostly clear, but the moon was just a sliver, providing little illumination. Lighting the fire was a rare moment of carelessness for him. Normally, he would tell her they couldn’t have a fire on a night like this. But the risk would be worth her momentary happiness.

***

She sat close to the fire, warming her hands, smiling. She slid close to him, which he tolerated, but when she leaned toward him and tried to kiss him, he pulled away.

“Now you won’t kiss me?” she said.

“You’re lucky that I even...” He trailed off, wishing he could take back the words he’d already said.

She was silent the rest of the night, sleeping away from him, but not too far. She wanted to be close to the fire, even if she was angry with him.

Michael couldn’t sleep. He lay awake thinking about what it means to love someone.

And then he wondered about what might have torn through the floorboards of the house. As he stared at the flickering shadows cast by the fire, he kept imagining tentacles slithering up from the darkness and wrapping around him. Or perhaps clawed hands reaching up, scratching the wood, a guttural growl coming from below. Or perhaps if he did fall asleep, he’d awake to find her gone, pulled down into the darkness. This was no overactive imagination. This was the world they lived in.

Near dawn, Ashley sat up and saw that he had not slept. She stood, readying her rifle, and said, “Go to sleep. I’ll keep watch.”

He trusted her, and now he was able to sleep.

***

He felt as if he’d only been sleeping briefly when Ashley shook him awake. The house was full of sunlight and the fire’s coals had turned gray, and he knew he had slept for hours.

“Someone’s coming,” she said.

He stood, awake instantly, reaching for his shotgun. They watched from a broken window. Three figures walking slowly toward the house, a plume of fog floating behind them. The figures were humans.

When the three travelers were within about fifteen yards of the front door, Michael stepped out onto the porch, aiming Ashley’s rifle at the strangers.

“Hold it right there,” he said, not trying to sound threatening, simply serious.

The three stopped. A man, a woman, and a younger woman, thirteen or fourteen years old, no more. Their faces were dirty. They were dressed in rags. The wind was whipping stronger than yesterday, and the tatters of their clothes snapped frantically around them. The man had a crossbow but he didn’t point it. He held it out with one arm, stretching his other arm the opposite way, as if preparing for a hug.

“My name is Cal,” the stranger said. “This is Jessie and Elise. We hoped we could take shelter with you for a spell.”

“We don’t have any food to spare,” Michael said.

“We understand,” Cal said. “But a roof over our heads would be nice. We saw your fire smoke last night.”

Michael hesitated. He felt it was important to stay human in this new world, and that meant having humanity for others. He lowered his gun. “We’re well armed,” he said. “So don’t try anything.”

Cal grinned broadly, showing off a mouthful of yellow teeth. His expression of happiness seemed genuine.

***

With the hole in the room—bigger now because Michael had pulled up boards to burn—there was hardly any room for them to sit except up against the walls. They created two semi-circles: Michael and Ashley on one side, Cal, Jessie, and Elise on the other. Elise was the girl. When she drew back her hood, Michael could see that she was quite pretty. She didn’t look anything like Cal or Jessie, and Michael wondered if she was their daughter or simply someone they’d picked up along the way. Cal was in his forties probably, his hair long and tied back in a ponytail, his stubble peppered with gray. Jessie might have once been pretty, but time had worn her features into ruddiness and wrinkles. She said nothing and kept her head down, as did the girl. The two females seemed drained by exhaustion, while Cal seemed energized to be among new company.

Cal tried to start conversations, but Michael and Ashley were unused to socializing with others, and their responses to any invitation to talk were curt. Both sides saw no need to tell the stories of how they arrived here. Everyone had their own stories of how they went from the old world to the new, what they had done in their past to make a living to what they did now simply to survive. But each story was the same, too, in many ways, so Michael saw no need to give his and Ashley’s biographies. Cal didn’t offer his either.