Night & Demons (62 page)

The statue stood up. It looked even bigger standing than it’d seemed while seated; Cashel didn’t think he could reach to the top of its head flat-footed. Not that he was likely to need to do that.

It started forward, raising its club. “Mona, get out of the way!” Cashel said in a growl.

He lifted the quarterstaff before him and began backing toward the door to the central room. The light was better there, and there was more space besides. He and his staff covered a lot of territory when the fight started.

Rock groaned against itself. The statue’s face shifted as its mouth moved. “I will destroy you . . .” the stone said in a rumble almost too low for human ears.

Cashel knew where the doorway was behind him. He feinted at the statue’s head, then stepped back quickly and surely. He kept his staff vertical to clear the narrow opening. Mona was somewhere nearby, a presence without form because all Cashel’s attention was on the statue. He hoped the girl’d stay clear, but he couldn’t worry about that right now.

The statue clumped through the doorway after him, barely clearing the jambs. It looked even uglier than it had in the relative shadow of the further room. “You cannot escape me . . .” it grated in a voice of emotionless menace.

Cashel spun his staff in a short sun-wise arc, crashing his left ferrule into the lumpish fist which gripped the stone club. There was a crack and flash of blue wizardlight; the creature growled like an approaching avalanche.

Cashel wasn’t looking for escape. He’d come to fight.

The statue rushed him, swinging the stone club in an overhead blow. Cashel rammed his staff forward like a spear. The blunt butt-cap slammed into the thing’s throat with another blue flash.

The creature’s head jerked back. The mighty arc of its club touched nothing but air till it smashed itself on the floor, cratering the alabaster. The grip flew out of the stone hand.

Cashel backed, gasping in deep breaths. He’d struck swiftly and as hard as he could, and the quivers of wizardlight meant he was using more than the strength of his great muscles. He was uncomfortable about that other business—he was a shepherd, not a wizard—but when he was facing a creature like this he was glad of any help he could get.

The thing held its hands up in front of its face. Its fingers were thin scorings in stone mitts; only the thumbs were separate. Its blunt features were those of a bestial doll a child had molded from clay.

The creature’s mouth opened. It screamed like millstones rubbing.

“Watch—” Mona cried, but Cashel didn’t need to be told what to do in a fight. The creature leaped toward him like a missile from a huge catapult. Cashel stepped back and sideways, thrusting his quarterstaff low. He slipped the thick hickory pole between the stone ankles; it flexed but held. The creature plunged head-first into the wall with a crash that rocked the tower.

The alabaster fractured in scalloped flakes, leaving a crater at the point of impact. The creature dropped flat on the floor. It braced its stone arms beneath it, starting to rise.

Cashel, holding the staff like a battering ram, struck the back of its head, bouncing it into the wall again. Light as blue as the heart of a sapphire flared at the double
crack!
of iron on stone and stone on stone.

Cashel stepped back, bending slightly and sucking air through his open mouth. The creature’s arms moved feebly, like an infant trying to swim. The ferrule Cashel had just struck with glowed orange, cooling to dull red. He switched ends, then brought the staff back with both arms.

The creature got its hands under it and lifted its head slightly. Cashel lunged forward, driving the staff down with the whole weight of his body. The butt hammered the creature at the same point as before. The statue’s head exploded in a flash and thunderclap. The massive body began to crumble the way a sand castle dissolves in the surf.

Cashel felt himself wavering. He planted the quarterstaff against the floor and used it to brace him as he let himself kneel. His breath was a rasping thunder, and his blood hammered in his ears.

The only part of the creature still remaining was the outstretched right arm. When it suddenly collapsed to a spill of sand, Cashel caught a brief reminder of the dry, sweet odor in which Giglia had vanished. Then nothing remained but air harsh with the faint brimstone reek of nearby lightning.

Cashel stayed like that for—well, for a time. He figured he could move if he had to, but since he didn’t he was just going to rest till he felt like doing something else.

Though he’d kept his eyes open, he didn’t have much awareness of his surroundings. There wasn’t a lot to see, after all; just the trail of coarse grit that’d been a statue there on the floor in front of him. It looked like what he’d seen on the hills he’d climbed to reach the tower. . . .

“Are you ready to go home, Cashel?” Mona said.

Cashel’s world clicked back into hard focus again. He turned his head and smiled at the girl, feeling a little embarrassed. How long had she been standing there, waiting for him to come to himself?

“I’m all right,” he said, wondering how true that was. He stood, lifting himself partly by the strength of his arms on the quarterstaff. He swayed a little, but no worse than you always did when you’d been bent over and got up suddenly.

He grinned wider and said, “I’m fine,” meaning it this time. “But how do we get back home, Mona?”

As Cashel spoke, he took a closer look at the walls. His eyes narrowed. “Mona?” he said. “Things don’t look right. The stone looks thin. It wasn’t like that before.”

“This world is decaying,” the girl said, “and not before time. We have to get you out of here, though. Come.”

She stepped through the doorway to the room where the statue had waited; the gold key was out in her hand again. Cashel followed, as he’d been doing ever since he met the girl—except when there was the fighting.

He grinned again. That was all right. Mona was better at leading than Cashel ever wanted to be, and she’d kept out of the way when he went to work.

Mona looked back at him. “I’m sorry I had to trick you,” she said. “Your help was very important.”

Cashel shrugged. “You didn’t have to trick me, Mona,” he said. “You could just have asked. But that’s all right.”

The throne had fallen into a pile of sand and pebbles like the thing that’d sat on it. On the wall behind was another door. Mona stuck the key into the door—there hadn’t been a keyhole that Cashel could see, but he was sure about what she’d just done—and pulled the panel open.

“Go on through, Cashel,” she said, smiling like the sun rising. “Thank you. We all thank you.”

Cashel hesitated. “You’re coming too, aren’t you, Mona?” he said. Light and color without shape swirled in the door opening.

Her smile became pensive. She raised the key in the hand that didn’t hold the door open. “I have to free the seeds we found,” she said. “Otherwise they’ll rot instead of growing as they should.”

“But what happens to you?” Cashel said.

“Go on back to your own world, Cashel,” Mona said, her voice hard without harshness. “There must be renewal.”

Cashel cleared his throat. He didn’t have anything to say, though, so he nodded and walked toward the opening. As his leading foot entered the blur of color, Mona said, “Your house will always be a happy one, dear friend.”

For a moment Cashel stepped through nothingness so silent that he heard his heart beating; then his boot heel clacked on stone. He was standing in the familiar hallway down which he’d been going to dinner.

“Oh!” cried a servant, dropping the pair of silver ewers he’d been carrying to refill from the well in the courtyard at the end of the passage. They rang on the floor, sounding sweet or hollow by turns as they rolled.

Cashel squatted, holding his staff upright in one hand as he caught the nearer pitcher. It might have a few new dings in it, but he didn’t guess the servant would get in real trouble.

“Oh, your lordship, I’m so sorry!” the fellow babbled. He took the ewer from Cashel’s hand but he was trembling so bad he looked like he might drop it again. “I didn’t see you!”

Cashel glanced at the door he’d come out of . . . and found there wasn’t one, just a blank wall between the entrances to a pair of large suites. He stood up. “Sorry,” he said apologetically. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Cashel headed on in the direction he’d been going when he’d first heard the girl—well, first heard Mona—crying. He’d never really liked this palace. It was a dingy place, badly run-down before Garric arrived and replaced the Count of Haft with a vicar.

Nothing Cashel could see was different about it now, but the corridor seemed a little cheerier than it used to be. He smiled. He’d have started whistling if he could carry a tune.

THE HUNTING
GROUND

I read (and always have read) both science fiction and fantasy. Mr. Derleth insisted that SF was merely a subset of fantasy, but even if that’s true (and I’m not sure it is) the statement doesn’t accurately describe most people’s perceptions. Still, because I move between fantasy and SF as a reader, it’s been easy for me to write both.

Nor do I see any reason that a horror story can’t be SF. Many years ago Ramsey Campbell asked me for my choice of the ten top horror stories. One of those I picked instantly was “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin, a pure SF story which I find horrifying in ways that one more nut with a meat cleaver can never be.

“The Cold Equations” proves my point in another fashion also. It’s well known that John Campbell published the story in
Astounding,
the quintessentially hard-SF magazine. It’s less well known that Godwin borrowed the plot from an EC horror comic. The boundaries between horror and SF are easily permeable.

Ramsey Campbell asked me for a story for
Superhorror,
an original horror anthology he was putting together. The only criterion was that the story be a good one. (One of the best in the collection was “The Viaduct” by Brian Lumley, a slice of autobiography with no fantasy element whatever.)

I chose to write a story that was SF in form, although it could have been done just as easily as a fantasy. Payment was to be two cents per word, but instead I traded the piece for the pencil rough draft of the novel Ramsey had just finished: his first,
The Doll Who Ate His Mother.

It’s neither the science nor the could-be fantasy that makes “The Hunting Ground” a horror story; it’s the character’s situation. There’s less fiction in that than I might wish.

I came back from Nam with no physical damage and an absolute refusal to admit that there might be other problems. We—my wife and I—rented rooms in an old house that had been split into three apartments for students and other people without a lot of money.

One of the nicest aspects of the house was the attached vacant lot. A large tree had been cut down a year or two past; the stump remained beside the driveway. I sat cross-legged on that stump, reading or writing, any time it wasn’t raining. For whatever reason, it was what my soul needed.

You’ll find that stump in “The Hunting Ground.” You’ll also find an accurate description of a neighborhood of Durham, NC, just north of Duke’s East Campus. And you’ll find a part of me; but I emphasize, only a small part.

* * *

T
he patrol car’s tires hissed on the warm asphalt as it pulled to the curb beside Lorne. “What you up to, snake?” asked the square-bodied policeman. The car’s rumbling idle and the whirr of its air conditioner through the open window filled the evening.

Lorne smiled and nodded the lighted tip of his cigarette. “Sitting on a stump in my yard, watching cops park on the wrong side of the street. What’re you up to, Ben?”

Instead of answering, the policeman looked hard at his friend. They were both in their late twenties; the man in the car stocky and dark with a close-cropped mustache; Lorne slender, his hair sand-colored and falling across his neck brace. “Hurting, snake?” Ben asked softly.

“Shit, four years is enough to get used to anything,” the thinner man said. Though Lorne’s eyes were on the chime tower of the abandoned Baptist church a block down Rankin Street, his mind was lost in the far past. “You know, some nights I sit out here for a while instead of going to bed.”

Three cars in quick succession threw waves of light and sound against the rows of aging houses. One blinked its high beams at the patrol car briefly, blindingly. “Bastard,” Ben grumbled without real anger. “Well, back to the war against crime.” His smile quirked. “Better than the last war they had us fighting, hey?”

Lorne finished his cigarette with a long drag. “Hell, I don’t know, sarge. How many jobs give you a full pension after two years?”

“See you, snake.”

“See you, sarge.”

The big cruiser snarled as Ben pulled back into the traffic lane and turned at the first corner. The city was on a system of neighborhood police patrols, an attempt to avoid the anonymous patrolling that turned each car into a miniature search and destroy mission. The first night he sat on the stump beside his apartment, Lorne had sworn in surprise to see that the face peering from the curious patrol car was that of Ben Gresham, his squad leader during the ten months and nineteen days he had carried an M60 in War Zone C.

And that was the only past remaining to Lorne.

The back door of Jenkins’s house banged shut on its spring. A few moments later heavy boots began scratching up the gravel of the common drive. Lorne’s seat was an oak stump, three feet in diameter. Instead of trying to turn his head, he shifted his whole body around on the wood. Jenkins, a plumpish, half-bald man in his late sixties, lifted a pair of canned Budweisers. “Must get thirsty out here, warm as it is.”

“It’s always thirsty enough to drink good beer,” Lorne smiled. “I’ll share my stump with you.”

They sipped for a time without speaking. Mrs. Purefoy, Jenkins’s widowed sister and a matronly Baptist, kept house for him. Lorne gathered that while she did not forbid her brother to drink an occasional beer, neither did she provide an encouragingly social atmosphere.