Spellbent (33 page)

“Hello, what can I do for you?” he asked, looking completely unperturbed that a woman with a sword was standing at his door. He glanced past me at the winged murder bearing down on his house. “Looks like a bad storm tonight, eh?”

“Yes, a very bad storm,” I agreed anxiously. “May I come inside, please?”

“Oh, sure, I suppose so,” he said. “Wouldn’t be very neighborly to leave a pretty girl like you out on a night like this, would it?”

The man held the front door open wide, and I dashed inside under his arm just as the first of the crows reached the porch.

“My name’s Lake,” the man said as he shut the door and bolted it. Two seconds later I heard a solid thud as a bird hit the door, then the scrape of claws and beaks against the wood.

“I haven’t seen you around here before,” Lake continued. “You move into the Murphy place down the road?”

“No sir, I’m from the city.” I stared at the house around me. It appeared to be a very nice, pleasant country home decorated with folksy knickknacks and colorful handmade quilts on the backs of sofas and chairs and woven rag rugs on the gleaming hardwood floors. “I came out here to find a friend who got lost in the woods.”

“Well, I hope your friend found a dry place for the night! You’re welcome to stay; we have a guest bedroom upstairs. My wife and I were just sitting down to dinner. . . care to join us?”

“Sure,” I said, intending to just sit politely at the table and not consume anything.

Lake led me into the dining room. The rectangular six-seat table was laden with a country feast: mashed potatoes, a boat of sausage gravy, green beans, fluffy biscuits, and an enormous roast turkey. The food smelled delicious; my mouth started watering despite my determination.

A pretty, gray-eyed woman in her mid-thirties wearing a green-checked gingham A-line dress sat at the far end of the table. Her long, curly black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and in her lap she held a large china doll dressed in a blue satin jacket and knickers. The doll had to be at least thirty inches tall, and looked like it was intended to be a replica of the figure from Thomas Gainsborough’s
Blue Boy
painting. The woman did not react when Lake entered the room, keeping her downcast gray eyes fixed on the top of the doll’s head. Something about the set of her nose and cheekbones reminded me of Cooper.

A crow rammed the window behind the sad woman’s seat. The noise made me jump, but neither Lake nor the woman seemed to notice it. More thumps and claw-scrapes; the whole mob had reached the house, and the birds were trying to get in. Although the windows rattled alarmingly, at least it seemed the crows weren’t striking with enough force to break the glass. I hoped the house’s chimney had a grate.

“Have a seat anywhere you like.” Lake settled in the chair at the head of the table near the sad woman.

“This sure is a lovely dinner,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady and not really making it. There was no room to sit down with the shield, so I sheathed my sword on it and pulled out two of the rail-back chairs opposite the woman. I carefully propped my shield up in the left chair and sat down in the right. I rotated the shield so I could quickly grab my sword if the need arose.

“I know it might seem like a lot for just two people, but my son Benny will be home tomorrow from boarding school, and we wanted to cook up a nice big bird for him,” Lake said. “That boy could eat his own weight in turkey sandwiches. He’s on the lacrosse team now; he was voted best midfielder in the eighth grade last year. He was on the honor roll every quarter, and he’s the tallest boy in his class.”

“I bet you and your wife are very proud,” I said, looking around at the room.

What was this place? My gut told me it was definitely a re-creation of the farmhouse as it existed thirty years ago, right before it burned down. I knew a little about hells, and this looked like the kind where tormented souls re-experienced the events leading up to their spiritual catastrophe over and over again in an endless loop. It was a living serial nightmare, partly metaphoric and partly real.

In a hell like this, tormented souls would eventually get some kind of epiphany or catharsis from their self-inflicted loop of pain, and then they’d move on to the Beyond. Or maybe they simply got bored, and went off to haunt something instead. Either way, three decades was a long time for a purgatory hell to exist. Was something keeping them here? I couldn’t tell.

If Cooper and the Warlock had come from this house, it would stand to reason that their parents or guardians had lived here as well. I couldn’t see anything of Cooper in Lake. But I could easily believe the man might be the Warlock’s father, and the sad wife looked like both brothers.

But who was the young man who’d transformed into a stag? And who was Benny? Clearly the souls trapped here in the hell had expected him to join them someday.

“Oh, we’re proud as brass buttons,” Lake said. He gave his wife a wide, toothy politician’s grin. “Benny’s going to be a big man in this state someday, just you see.”

My heart bounced. I’d definitely seen that same smile on Mr. Jordan’s face. The realization hit me:

Benny could be short for Benedict. Could Mr. Jordan be Cooper’s half brother and the Warlock’s full brother?

Something rapped sharply at the window. The battered, bleeding young stag had staggered up to the glass, apparently trying to drive the crows away. His horns squeaked against the pane, and I could see that his muzzle was covered in scratches. He stared at me through swollen eyelids and gave a couple of hoarse barking cries as if he were trying to warn me of something.

Lake didn’t seem to notice the stag. He lifted the bowl of mashed potatoes and offered it to me. “Try these; we grew ‘em right here on the farm.”

I took the bowl, trying to be polite, and put a spoonful on my plate. I figured I could push them around and make it seem like I was eating.

Underneath the sounds of the stag and the crows battling at the window, I thought I could hear someone sobbing. It sounded like it was coming from the basement beneath my feet.

My right eye, blind in the woods, was sending flashes of
something
to my brain now that I was in the house. The stone eye was starting to itch as it had when I held the odeiette at the Warlock’s apartment. My current gemview, I suspected, wasn’t giving me the whole story. Bracing myself, I stared at the sad woman and her pretty china boy and blinked to the next view.

The woman was dressed in a long purple satin dress that had clearly once been regal, but now the fabric was stained and the ermine trim was moth-eaten and tattered. She rocked in her chair, weeping, her face dirty and her curls a ratty mess that looked like they hadn’t seen a comb in weeks. Her wrists were chafed as if she’d been wearing shackles. She clutched a large, naked ball-jointed doll made from pale wood. The doll’s face was a smooth blank plane except for two eyes made from dark blue glass.

Lake was standing at the head of the table dressed in a ragged ermine mantle over a dirty red surcoat and white tunic. A tarnished brass crown sat on his head.

He shouted at the weeping woman: “I can’t believe my son came out of a faithless witch like you!, you were just going to abandon him, weren’t you? But my son’s going to rule the world someday, and you’re going to help him. He’ll have magic so strong no one will believe it, you hear me? Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

I turned away from Lake’s insane fury, and finally noticed that the room had changed. The walls were the dark gray stone of a medieval castle, and the dinner table had turned to old oak planks on trestle legs. Torches smoked and flickered in wrought-iron sconces. The food had turned to wood; the turkey was a painted burl, and the mashed potatoes were nothing more than sawdust.

King Lake turned his fury on me. “Why aren’t you eating?” he barked. “My food not good enough for you, is that it?”

“No sir, I’m just not very hungry—”

“Liar!” he snarled at me. “How
dare
you lie to me in my own house!”

He came around the table at me, his fist raised. I grabbed the sword, but as soon as I touched the metal a warning rose in my mind. This version of Lake, though strange, felt more real than the polite dinner host, but I couldn’t kill a man who was surely already dead. My stone eye flashed a vision of King Lake throwing me off the front porch to the hungry mob of crows. I quickly blinked back through a dozen dark, strange views until I saw the tidy country home once again.

Lake was sitting in his chair, calmly buttering a fluffy biscuit. The woman sat silent, not eating, gazing down at her china doll. I slowly released the sword, my heart still pounding.

“You don’t have to eat if you’re not hungry,” Lake told me. “You look like you’ve had a long day; would you like me to just take you up to the guest room so you can get some rest?”

“Sure,” I replied. Maybe once he’d left me alone I could figure out a way to sneak down to the basement. “That sounds like a good idea.”

I picked up my sword and shield, and Lake led me out of the dining room back through the foyer to a staircase.

“Benny will be home tomorrow around noon; my nephew Reggie is driving him out here. We’ve got a wonderful birthday surprise for Benny,” Lake said as he led me up the narrow stairs. “He’s almost a man now, by my reckoning. It’s going to be a very special day for him. You should stay for the party; I bet Benny would love to meet a pretty woman like you.”

Nephew Reggie. I remembered what the young man in the woods had told me before his transformation, remembered his 1970s-era clothing. The stag was Reggie, I realized, still trying to protect his family from the evil that had driven him to suicide. I was more convinced than ever that this house was the place Cooper and the Warlock had lived before Cooper lost his memory.

“A party sounds like fun,” I said, being careful to not overtly promise Lake anything. I wasn’t sure if a casual promise in this place would be spiritually binding, but I didn’t want to take any more risks than I had to.

He pulled open a door that led to a small bedroom with a single bed, a writing desk, and an old fashioned sewing machine in the corner. A narrow door led to a closet-sized half bathroom with a small green night-light in the electric fixture by the sink.

“It’s nothing fancy, but it’s comfortable,” he said.

“This is great, thanks.” I stepped inside.

“Sleep tight! Don’t let the bedbugs bite!” He abruptly shut the door behind me, and I heard a bolt click.

Dammit!

I turned and tried the doorknob. It was locked fast. I leaned my full weight into the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Great. Just great. I set my shield down on the bed, then knelt to inspect the knob to see if it had any screws that might be removed. The brass knob ring was smooth and featureless. The hinges were on the other side of the door, so I couldn’t pry them loose.

I stood and took a deep breath. There
had
to be a way Out of the bedroom, hopefully a
quiet
way that wouldn’t let Lake know what I was up to. I glanced toward the window. A big crow hovered awkwardly outside, cocking its head to stare at me with its cold black eyes. It pecked the glass fiercely as if to emphasize that the exterior of the house was indeed a very bad place to be. There’d be no sneaking out across the roof and down a drain spout to the storm cellar, at least not for me.

I stared back at the crow. More and more of its brothers were arriving to hover beyond the glass or lurk on the windowsill. All stared at me balefully. Soon there would be so many crowding at the window that they would block out the light from the shattered moon.

Acting on a hunch, I blinked to the gemview that had shown me insane King Lake and the wooden feast. The cozy guest room around me turned into a stark medieval gaol cell. The bed was a dirty burlap sack of straw on a wooden bench; the bathroom was nothing more than a narrow alcove containing a filthy pine bucket and a crude floor drain. The window had become a tall, narrow opening through the stone, far too stingy for an adult to squeeze through. Nonetheless, it had been covered with a rusty iron latticework.

The creatures pressing against the lattice no longer appeared as birds. At first glance they looked like sponges soaked in black india ink. I pulled one of the torches out of its sconce and brought the flame to the window to get a better look.

They still looked like sponges, but in some of the larger pores I could see small, probing, tentacle-like tongues. In other pores I saw tiny, circular grinding mouths. I thought of the slimy jaws of hagfish. And in others shone beady eyes a deeper black than their porous flesh. I felt a deep, primal hatred toward the weird creatures, the sort of animosity I supposed a mongoose raised in a laboratory might feel when it finally laid eyes on a cobra.

I squinted at the spongy little monsters, wondering if I might remember some long-forgotten bit of information that would explain to me what they were. Something nagged in the back of my head, just below my conscious recollection, a shark in murky water that refused to surface. Perhaps I’d read of creatures like these in some arcane bestiary years ago. Whatever the case, I could no longer recall their proper names.

But as I continued to stare at them, I realized that whatever they were, they were giving off the hungry, heedless energy of very young creatures. They were larvae, perhaps, or hatchlings.

“So where’s your mother?” I asked them through the window. They answered me by sucking at the iron bars, tiny teeth chattering silently.