Night & Demons (60 page)

“Maybe,” the storekeeper agreed, his voice even. “You know, you’re the first to stay up there since Jack died. Marion wouldn’t rent it out, and Myra didn’t try till this year, I reckon.”

Ribaud shrugged. “There was something I wanted to ask you about that,” he said, getting to the business that had brought him to the store this morning. “You say that Cutshall was shot one Sunday?”

“That’s right.”

“Ah . . . what time of day would that have been?”

“’Bout half-past nine in the morning,” Parry said. He frowned and corrected himself, glancing out the window toward the deserted highway. “Mebbe a little before; half-past is when Dace come in. I was tinkerin’ with my radia, and I wan’t gettin’ a blessed thing but a sermon from Asheville.”

Ribaud looked at his watch. It was not quite nine, about the time he’d started up to the pond the previous Sunday. “Well, I’ll be seeing you,” he said, reaching for the door.”

“Don’t you want something?” Parry asked suspiciously.

“Ah . . . Ribaud said. “Ah, yeah. Give me another pint if you would. I finished the last one.”

Parry’s face hardened, but after a moment’s hesitation he unlatched the cupboard.

It was a quarter past nine when Ribaud pulled up beside his cabin, skidding a little on the wet grass. As soon as he got out of the car, the feeling of pressure grew on him. He climbed toward the spring, paralleling the dew-gleaming length of copper water pipe.

A bird flew ahead of him. Nothing else moved.

The cabin squatted innocently below Ribaud. The front door was open. He was almost sure that he had latched it when he left.

He could not see the car where he had just parked it.

Jack Cutshall walked out of the cabin and stretched. The psychic pressure was insupportable.

“Run!” Ribaud screamed. “
Run!”

He heard the double echo of his voice from the cabin wall and the far side of the hollow. Cutshall, stone deaf and twenty years dead, walked around the cabin to get firewood.

Ribaud ran down the hill. His foot slipped. He fell bruisingly against the rocky soil, but he jumped to his feet again.

Cutshall reappeared with an armload of firewood. He took a step toward the cabin door and vanished from Ribaud’s sight.

Ribaud slid to a halt. The door was closed; his Mustang was beside the cabin. Tingling pressure made the writer shudder.

Cutshall should have been right in front of him. Instead, everything looked as it had when Ribaud left the cabin to go to the store.

Cutshall should have been right in front of him . . . .

“Run!” Ribaud shouted again.

He turned and stared up the hilltop. He had only time to note the changed outline, the pines far smaller than the ones around the spring in his day but still shadowing all but a glint of sky reflected from a telescopic sight.

Ribaud’s mouth opened to scream.

One hundred yards and twenty years away, a rifle shot slapped echoes from the hollow. Ribaud did not hear it. His skull exploded. His body was already dropping back into its own time.

The murderer cursed and jacked another shell into
the chamber. Below him, Jack Cutshall broke into a run, but he would not live to tell why Sam Barnard’s first bullet had missed him.

* * *

Author’s Note

In the Fall of 1971, I visited the mountains of North Carolina with Manly Wade Wellman and stayed with local friends of his for a few days after Manly returned to Chapel Hill. “The Waiting Bullet” grew out of the scenery and the stories I absorbed during that trip.

I wrote the first draft of the story shortly after I came home. I wrote it for Manly, really, an old-fashioned ghost story set among the places and people I’d encountered in his company. Though I read the draft to him, I didn’t go on to polish the story into final form at that time.

Manly is gone now; and 1971 is gone also, in the mountains as surely as everywhere else. So, for my friend and for a time that are now both memories, I dug out that old draft and finished it as I would have done at the time if I’d been able to.

Honor to them both.

Dave Drake

Chapel Hill, NC

THE ELF HOUSE

Bill Fawcett, a friend and a book packager, put together for Baen Books what was supposed to be an original anthology of novellas by Dave Weber, Eric Flint, and me. (It was a little more complex than that to begin with, and a lot more complex before the book eventually came out.) For that volume I wrote a Hammer novella which became part of an episodic Hammer novel.

Bill then sold a fantasy equivalent and asked me to write a short story in the Isles universe. Each volume of my Isles fantasy series has four individual viewpoint strands which combine for the climax. If Bill had been able to use a novella, I might’ve written a sequence which I’d spread out over five or six chapters when it appeared in the next Isles novel. A short story didn’t fit that novel format, so I simply wrote “The Elf House” from scratch with no expectation—then or now—of ever reusing it as part of an Isles novel.

I wrote the story to be self-standing. If it had any value at all beyond doing a favor to a friend, it needed to be accessible to readers who had no previous familiarity with the Isles series. That meant limiting it to a single character.

I picked Cashel because he’s friendly, cheerful, and very direct. Basically, I like him. (I identify with Cashel’s sister Ilna, who’s angry, harsh, and generally depressed, but that’s another matter entirely.)

I knew the concept of the “The Elf House” wasn’t original to me, but until I’d finished the rough draft I couldn’t have told you from whom I’d stolen it. In reading it through for the first time, the source was obvious: “Kazam Collects,” an early work by Cyril Kornbluth.

If I needed proof of how much better a writer I could be than I am, all I’d have to do is reread any of a dozen or more pieces which Kornbluth dashed off before he was twenty. Because I don’t need that proof, I reread Kornbluth simply for the pleasure of discovering new flashes of brilliance with each reading. I suggest that all of you read him also.

* * *

C
ashel didn’t need to carry his quarterstaff in the corridors of the Vicar’s palace—what’d been the Count of Haft’s place till Prince Garric arrived the week before—but he was more comfortable holding the smooth, familiar hickory than he’d be otherwise. He didn’t dislike big buildings, but he disliked being in them; and this palace had a nasty feel all its own.

Besides, the staff had been a friend in places where Cashel had no other friends. He wouldn’t feel right about leaving it alone in the huge suite assigned to him while he went off to dinner with Garric in the roof garden. If the servants, officials, and the amazing number of other people crowding the palace stared at him, well, a man as big as Cashel or-Kenset was used to being stared at whether he carried a quarterstaff or not.

For a wonder there wasn’t anybody around at the moment. Cashel sauntered down the hall looking at the cherub mural painted just above shoulder level. In the dim light through the transoms of the rooms to either side, there was something new to catch every time he passed.

Cashel started to grin at the little fellow with his wings spread as he struggled to lead a goat who didn’t want to go. The sound of a girl crying jerked his head around.

He’d been holding the quarterstaff straight up and down in one hand. Now, without him thinking about it his left hand slipped into position a span below the right and he slanted the staff before him. “Ma’am?” he said, ready to deal with whatever was making a woman cry.

The girl wore servant’s clothing, a cap and a simple gray tunic set off by a sash of bleached wool. She knelt a little way down a corridor which joined the main one from the right. Cashel didn’t remember there being anything but a blank wall there, but he guessed he’d always missed it because he’d been intent on the mural opposite.

She gave another vain push at the inward-opening door in front of her, then looked up at Cashel with eyes glittering with tears. “Oh, sir!” she said. “I dropped the key and it slipped under the door. The steward will beat me if I don’t get it back!”

“I don’t guess he will,” Cashel said. The notion that somebody’d beat a little slip of a girl surprised him into speaking in a growl. He didn’t know her, but he didn’t think men ought to hit any girls. He was real sure no man was going to try that twice in front of Cashel or-Kenset.

He cleared his throat and went on in a normal voice, “But anyhow, let’s see if I can’t get your key.”

The door stood a finger’s breadth ajar. Cashel pressed with the fingertips of his right hand without budging it further. It was stuck, that was all; rusty hinges, he figured, since the panel didn’t bind to the lintel or transom. Through the crack at the edge he could see a glint of gold in what was otherwise darkness; the key was there, all right. It must’ve bounced wrong off the stone floor.

Cashel leaned his quarterstaff against the wall beside him and placed his hands one above the other on the latch side of the panel. The girl looked up at him intently. She seemed older, all of a sudden, and there was no sign of her frightened despair of a moment ago. He made sure his feet were set, then put his weight against the wood.

More people lived in the palace than did in all Barca’s Hamlet where Cashel’d grown up. Even though there wasn’t any traffic in the main corridor, sounds constantly echoed through the hallways and made the floor quiver. All that stopped; Cashel pressed against the panel in dead silence. Maybe it was the effort, because the door still didn’t want to give—

And then it did, though with creaking unwillingness. It opened another finger’s breadth, twice that . . . .

The girl stuck her arm in, calling something that Cashel could barely hear through the roar of blood in his ears. “I can’t quite . . .” she said, so he kept pushing and the door gave some more, enough that she squeezed her torso into the room beyond.

Cashel shoved harder yet. He could feel the wood fighting him like the staff of a bent bow, ready to snap back if he let up the pressure. “I’ve got it!” the girl said, only her legs from the knees down out in the hallway where Cashel could see them. “I’ve—”

And then she shrieked, “Milord, I’m falling!” shrilly. Her legs slid out of sight, following the rest of her. She was wearing sandals with straps of green-dyed cut-work.

Cashel didn’t understand what was happening, but as the girl slipped inward he slammed his shoulder hard against the panel instead of just shoving with his hands. He hadn’t done that before because he didn’t want to smash the door, but now he didn’t care.

The door didn’t break, neither the thick fir panel nor the squealing hinges that fought him all the way, and he swung it open at right angles. The room within was small and dingy. There was no furniture, and part of the rotten wainscoting had fallen onto the floor.

The girl had the key in one hand and reached toward Cashel with the other. She looked like she was sliding backwards, but she was already farther away than the far wall of the room.

Cashel grabbed the staff with his left hand and stretched it out to the girl. She couldn’t reach it and screamed again. Her voice was growing fainter; he could see her body shrink as the distance increased.

“Duzi!” Cashel bellowed. He strode into the room, holding the quarterstaff out in both hands. The girl grabbed it, but Cashel’s feet slipped like he was standing on an icy hillside.

The door slammed behind him. The only light was a dim, yellow-brown glow that silhouetted the girl’s body and he and she plunged down an unseen slope.

Cashel felt himself spinning as he dropped, but his body wasn’t touching anything. The girl held the other end of his staff; he couldn’t see her expression, but she didn’t bawl in fear or make any sound at all that he noticed.

They skidded onto a gritty hillside and stopped. Cashel looked over his shoulder. All he saw was gray sky and a rising slope. There wasn’t any sign of the room where they’d come from. He looked all around and didn’t see anything he liked better.

The bare hills ranged in color from yellow-white to the red of rusty iron. For the most part the rock had weathered into gravel, but there were outcrops where the stone must’ve been harder. The general landscape wasn’t pretty, but the outcrops were worse. Whenever Cashel looked hard at one, he started to see a large, angry face.

He got up, brushing crumbled rock from the back of his tunic. He hadn’t come down hard, for all that they’d seemed to be rushing headlong through emptiness. He glanced at the girl, already on her feet. She smiled and said, “My name is Mona, Lord Cashel. Do you know where we are?”

“Just Cashel, please, mistress,” he said with a grimace. “I’m not lord anything.”

He cleared his throat, looking around again. The landscape wasn’t any more appealing on a careful survey than it’d been when he first landed in it. “And I don’t know anything about this place, except I wish we were someplace else.”

“It’s where the house elf lives,” Mona said. She was looking at the landscape also, turning her head slowly. “Used to live, I mean. There can’t be anything alive here except the dwelling itself.”

She held her arms across her bosom; her expression was coldly disapproving. From Mona’s features she was younger than Cashel’s nineteen years, but her eyes were a lot older than that.

Cashel followed the line of her gaze up a series of streaked, ragged slopes. On top of a butte was what at first he’d taken for white stone weathered into a spire. When he squinted and let it sink in angle by angle, he realized he was seeing a manmade tower with battlements on top. A slant of windows curved around the shaft the way they’d do to light a circular staircase.

“You mean that castle?” Cashel said, nodding toward the structure instead of pointing. “That there’s people living there?”

“There’s no people here and no elves either,” the girl said as she stared toward the tower. “Only us. And I don’t mean the building, Cashel. This whole world was the dwelling for the house elf.”

Cashel cleared his throat. He took out the pad of raw wool he carried in his belt wallet and wiped the smooth hickory surface of his quarterstaff as he thought.