Redheads (45 page)

She put her hand on the small of Chris’s back and tried to clear her mind. If she could feel its thoughts, maybe it could feel hers. She focused on Chris’s back so she wouldn’t look at the tunnel or the steps. She opened her mind like a blank screen for the creature to cast its images upon, in the hope that none of her own thoughts would flow back out. This was like jumping into deep, cold water: she regretted it right away, but it was too late to take it back. She hooked her finger through one of Chris’s belt loops and let him lead her down the next long stairway.

But she didn’t see the steps at all.

She was kneeling on a ledge at a mountain pass overlooking an ice-bound fjord, shivering in the cold and striking flints together above a small pile of tinder. When a spark smoldered in the tiny nest of shredded birch bark, she was leaning close to it and blowing, adding stripped twigs to the growing flame until the fire caught. She piled on larger sticks from the heap of firewood next to the ring of stones, and knelt by the fire until she knew it needed no more tending. Then she turned and went into the cave behind her, walking through the darkness without any need for light.

She had left her prey back there, on a stone shelf at the far end of the cave. She gathered up the child and walked back to the fire. The child was already dead, its skull crushed. This was one of a pair that she’d caught; she’d already eaten the other. It was still wrapped in a swaddling cloth made of the skin of some animal. A bear, maybe. She removed the animal skin and threw it off the edge of the cliff and took one of the bigger branches from the wood pile to make a spit to cook the child. She sharpened the stick with the edge of a broken rock, skewered the child, and propped the stick next to the fire so the meat was close to the flames but not in them.

From her spot on the ledge she could look down and see the squalid encampment on the bank of the fjord where she had taken this prey, but she knew the small band would move on when they discovered they were being hunted.

It was no matter. She could follow them from a distance if she wanted to. She could track them through the mountains in the snow and pick them off one by one whenever they strayed from each other; she could rush into their camp in the middle of the night and take them all at once. It didn’t matter if they threw stones or spears. She was too fast for them.

Or, if she felt like it, she could crawl into the back of her cave and make a bed of pine needles and skins, and seal herself up with a wall of rocks and sleep until spring or the spring after that and then come out to see if the world had brought better pickings. Or see if any of the Others had returned. She watched the child cook next to the fire and watched the thin lines of smoke rising from the camp far below her and listened to the howls of wolfs rising from the ledges behind her. The wolves could smell the meat cooking, but they could also smell her own scat and they knew better than to approach. She liked the lonely sound the wolves made, and the way the meat smelled when it sizzled, and the memory of catching this child and its older brother in the snow. She wondered if there was Another somewhere in the mountains on the far side of the ice, looking down on the same camp from its own fire and its own prey.

Julissa bit her tongue until it bled, and by doing so finally shut out the dream.

She swallowed a mouthful of hot blood and spit, unhooked her finger from Chris’s belt, and felt in the darkness along the stock of the sub-machinegun, switching its safety off. She felt her pockets for the extra clips and swept her light around, seeing this part of the passage for the first time. She still felt cold from the dream, numb from the glacial wind of whatever place and time she had just escaped. She looked around.

Here and now, they were coming towards the end of this tunnel. She felt the gun again with her fingers to be sure it was set for automatic fire. The dream had been pounding at her with such ferocity when she finally closed it out that she knew they were almost on top of it. There was a chamber up ahead; she told herself that she was not afraid, that she was here with people she loved. They had come to settle a very old account.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

When they reached the bottom of the second set of stairs, Chris thought they might have come down as much as a thousand feet. Because the curve between the flights of steps had led them to the west, he thought they were probably directly underneath the castle. Ahead of him the passageway appeared to open into a chamber. He walked until he was five feet from the end of the narrow passage and waited to feel Julissa behind him. Then he stepped into the chamber, swept his light to the left and saw Julissa rush out to cover the right. Westfield came last, his light searching the high ceiling.

They were in its dining room, or perhaps its dining room from a thousand years ago. A waist-high flat rock took up the middle of the long rectangular hall. The vaulted ceiling reached up fifty or sixty feet above them at its peak, carved from solid rock. The walls were lined with stone pillars. But it was the floor that held Chris’s attention. It was littered with bones: rib cages and skulls and individual leg bones, all of them gnawed and broken in pieces to get at their marrow, whole femurs split lengthwise down the middle and gnawed apart at either end as if by a dog. A few of the skulls still had locks of long red hair hanging from patches of dry scalp, and there were braids and plaits of red hair swept along the base of the table stone in the middle of the room. A cast iron brazier sat on the middle of that stone, its cold ashes littered with chunks of half-cremated bones. In the corner farthest from where they had entered was a pile of discarded corsets and petticoats, moldering woolen and silk dresses, tartan hoop skirts, cotton bloomers, and leather shoes, all of them ripped and shredded and stained. There was even an age-yellowed wedding dress, slashed across the middle where it was stained black with the blood of its last occupant now dead a century or more. The far side of the room opened to another passage, this one wider than the one from which they had entered.

Chris walked around the table stone. He kept away from the pillars and checked behind each one as he passed it. There were old bones, and behind one pillar was an entire skeleton hanging from its skull on an iron spike, its dry skin dangling in ribbons from its feet. But there was no creature hiding in the shadows.

Westfield had passed on the other side of the table and had gone to the mound of clothing. While Chris covered the entrance to the next passage, he glanced sideways and saw Westfield use his foot to lift the wedding dress to the side.

There was nothing beneath it but more old clothes.

“
You didn’t really think you could talk to Stark without talking to me, did you? I’ve owned him since before his grandfather was born.”

Westfield swung around, searching with his light and his gun.

Chris and Julissa were doing the same, the lights arcing wildly in the dark chamber. Shadows and bones. There were tunnels coming out of the ceiling, passageways leading out of the highest parts of the walls. It could be anywhere.

“You hear that?” Julissa asked.

“I don’t know,” Chris said. “It might’ve just been in our minds.”

“But we all heard it, or felt it,” Westfield said.

There was a hard metallic slam from the stairs they’d descended. It had cut them off somehow, dropped some unseen portcullis or gate. That much was clear.

“
Stark told you to come here because I told you to come here.
”

Behind Chris, Westfield fired a shot at one of the tunnels in the ceiling. The gun blast was deafening in the stone chamber, and in the ringing silence afterwards Chris could barely hear Westfield’s words.

“Thought I saw…”

“You saw nothing
.”

The creature’s words hadn’t lost any volume; it might have been speaking aloud, but it was also speaking directly inside Chris’s head.

What are you?
Chris thought.

The answer rushed into his mind like a flood of dirty water.

Hungry.

That message must have been just for him, because neither Julissa nor Westfield reacted at all. But Chris almost fell to his knees from the force of the thing’s thought.

“Get each other’s backs,” Julissa shouted. “Come to the center and get each other’s backs.”

They all moved to the center of the room, just behind the table stone. They stood in a triangle, shoulder to shoulder, their lights searching the walls and ceiling.

“Call out if you see—” Westfield trailed off and then started firing his pistol. Then he was screaming wildly.

Chris turned to see Westfield on his back, his face bloodied. Julissa was kneeling over him. Something white ran along the far wall in a blur, disappearing into one of the tunnels before Chris even got off a second shot.

Empty cartridge cases clinked across the stone floor.

Westfield writhed under Julissa’s hands and screamed.

Chris’s light searched the overhead tunnels, the stairwell, the wide passage way on the far side of the room. There were too many places to check.

“Julissa!”

“He’s still alive but it tried to take out his eyes—”

Chris heard something behind him, a rustle like old leaves. He turned, raising the gun. The thing that hit him was just a blurry vacancy, a shape his eyes couldn’t see because the creature was standing there in his mind like a buzzing electric current, blocking everything.

Later, he would remember little except for the yellow eyes.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Julissa was trying to stop the bleeding on Aaron’s neck and face, trying to keep him still. She had taken his gun from him so he wouldn’t accidentally shoot her for her efforts, and had set her own gun aside. He was screaming and the blood was flowing between her fingers, hot and too fast. She pulled off her scarf and began wrapping it around his neck, and that was when Chris started to fire his gun from behind her. She dropped the scarf and fumbled for the Uzi, bringing it around just as Chris hit the stones beside her. She fired at the first thing she saw, blasting apart the skull of the skeleton hanging from a hook behind one of the pillars. Then she looked at Chris’s face, putting her fingers on his lips. He was still breathing and was not bleeding much except for a trickle from his left temple.

Westfield screamed again, a gargled shout that sounded like her name.

She turned, but the thing had her from behind. It ripped the Uzi away from her with its taloned hands even as it was carrying her across the floor and up the wall. As it reached the ceiling, it slammed her head into a rock and she blacked out for a second, coming-to in time to see the scene in the room she was leaving, lit by three flashlights on the floor: Chris was struggling to sit up, Westfield was still screaming.

Then it was dragging her down a stone tunnel by her ankles, fast.

“
They actually brought you to me,”
the thing said.

It came to a stop and seemed to hover over her. There was still a little light from the opening of the tunnel. Its eyes glowed like a pair of embers.

“
They brought you down here with nothing but some guns
,” it said.
“They might as well have put you on a plate.
”

She was paralyzed, either with fear or because it was immobilizing her somehow. She could feel its fingers moving over her sweatshirt, the press of its talons against her flesh. It traced a claw along the underside of her breast and found her nipple.

“
We’ll do it here. They’ll want to listen.”

Chris screamed, from somewhere far back.

“
Julissa!
”

There was a flash of light and then it was darker again. Chris was searching the ceiling for the right tunnel and had passed it over. The leering thing above her felt all this too; it was there in her mind, dancing around the edges of her terror. And it was there between her thighs, pressing against the seam of her jeans. Hard and sharp, like the broken bones in its tunnels. If it entered her, it would rip her to pieces. When she remembered the syringe, it sensed that too.

But it wasn’t fast enough.

She brought up her wrist and shoved it towards the thing’s neck. It tried to back off the needle, but she had her other arm around its back, feeling the sharp ridges of bone that came out of its spine. She felt the needle sink in.

You fucking animal
, she thought.
Here’s a trick right out fucking Wild Kingdom. I look like a redhead, but I’ve got a stinger.

She flicked her wrist back, pulling the shoelace taut with her middle finger. The plunger sank all the way in, and she rode up with the creature as it bucked backwards and howled. Then it was off of her, the sharp ridges of its spine tearing her hand as it snapped around and ran down the tunnel. She could hear its leathery feet slapping the stones as it sprinted away on all fours.

Now the howling was real and not just in her mind. An inhuman wail. Like an animal caught in a fire. She struggled to her knees and felt in her pocket for the second flashlight. It was a tiny keychain light with a single LED bulb. She pushed the button and looked around. There was a pile of bones next to her. She found a shattered femur, sharply splintered in the middle.

What the hell.

She stood and began to follow the thing’s screams, slowly at first. But when its howls quieted as it drew farther ahead, she broke into a run.