“There is something fell in the air tonight. Beware.”
Gregor turned to regard the seer from under his cowl. The old man had been sitting at the same stool in front of the bar for the last four hours, issuing his foul warnings.
“The air of the Deadwood is thick tonight, my friends, thick with evil.”
Gregor shook his head and turned back to his untouched tankard of ale. Occasionally he put it to his lips and then set it back down, but the liquid level hadn’t changed.
He knew he’d need his wits tonight.
The Seventh Hanged Man was gloomy as ever and it wasn’t just the old man with his portents. The torches burned low, flickering against the darkness, fighting for mastery. The stairs leading to the four or five rooms that Kellen rented out were black as pitch, apparently someone decided they didn’t need to light the torches tonight. The place was sparse, as it had been of late. Gregor looked out the window and saw nothing but darkness, when the door opened he could see the muted glow of a hanging lamp, dimly lighting the cobblestones leading to the town square.
Gregor hung back in the shadows, waiting.
When he felt the tap on his shoulder, his heart tried to leap from his chest.
Stefan turned from the table and walked up the dark stairs. Gregor wasn’t sure how he could see, but Stefan’s moving shape offered some kind of reference to follow as they moved upstairs.
The wizard proceeded Gregor into a small room, equipped with a candle, table, a rickety chair and a four post bed. A branch scratched earnestly at the window.
“You have a job?” Gregor asked.
Stefan walked to the window, the cowl of his grey robes pulled up. “I do. I need you to travel to Becker’s Farm and bring me the contents of the chest kept on the top floor. You won’t need help, but I need everything in the chest.” Stefan turned from the window to regard Gregor. “I see you’re armed, that is good.”
Gregor’s hand drifted down to the long sword he wore belted to his hip. He shrugged, adjusting his soft black leather harness, equipped with instruments and tools of the trade, metal rods, caltrops, powder, etc.
“Horse?”
Stefan shook his head. “No one can know you were there.”
Gregor left the room and moved back down the stairs, he passed the old man, still raving of the apocalypse, and pushed his way out of the Hanged Man.
There was no moon out tonight, perfect weather for the job he had to do.
So why was he getting chills?
Gregor jogged north out of Warden’s Gate, passing the darkened house of Mistress Klara. He was sure no one had seen him, who else would be out on a night like this, but he waited until he was around the bend before ducking into the bushes.
It took him close to thirty minutes of steady jogging before he reached a thin patch of trees. Gregor crouched, breathing a little heavy. He parted the bushes in front of him and saw Becker’s.
Strange.
There was no light coming from the farmstead’s windows yet it wasn’t near late enough for the family to have gone to bed.
Once Gregor’s breathing became more controlled, he began inching his way closer to the farmstead. He pressed his back up against the wooden walls and listened. From within he could hear rustling, and the heavy steps of something moving.
Something.
No person moved like that, moved that heavy.
Gregor, every hair on his arm standing up, moved out from the wall and looked up at the window. It was only twelve feet above his head. He jumped and grabbed a small crack, finding similar handholds and footholds, he scaled his way up to the window. He hung there, just below the window, before slowly levering his head up to the dingy glass.
At first he couldn’t see anything, only the shadows of a railing, a throw rug and a table. He moved a little to his left, trying to see into one of the corners, when he spotted the dark shape of the chest he needed.
Holding on with one hand, he reached into his harness and removed a metal rod with a crystal attached to it. An expensive tool, he was sure it cost someone quite a few gold.
Maybe the person he stole it from had the gold to buy another set.
He pressed the crystal against the window and held his breath, and then he slowly drew a large circle on the glass.
The sound that came from this, a whining, scratching sound, wasn’t loud, but in the still of the night it seemed to reverberate until he was sure the people of Warden’s Gate must have heard it.
Gregor froze. Something had moved near the chest.
He strained to see what it was, for a second he saw the shadow of something large.
Was that something?
It was.
Gregor shrieked, letting go of his handholds and plummeting. He struck the earth, his shriek ending in a rush of breath. He laid there, fighting hard to breathe, when he saw the window explode outward, a large shape flying over his head and vanishing into the brush behind him.
He threw his hands over his head and tried to roll away from the falling glass. Once it was safe, he jumped up and sprinted for the road.
Thirty minutes through the brush at a jog turned into ten minutes down the road at a sprint. Gregor flew through the door of the Hanged Man, slid on a wet spot and barely caught himself on a table where a woman in a nice purple robe raised his eyebrow at him. He turned and saw that she, the old seer, and the bartender all seemed to be watching him with a raised eyebrow.
He turned and fled upstairs. Kicking open the door to Stefan’s room he saw the wizard hunched over something on the table, momentarily startled by Gregor’s entry he saw a human forearm bone, wrapped in some sort of dirty rag.
“Something-farm-Gods!” Gregor said. Darkness pressed in on him from all directions and he fell to his knees, then he knew no more.
Gregor’s nose twitched.
Consciousness returned to Gregor in a hurry. He gasped for air as he rolled over onto his back, grasping at the sheets on the four post bed.
Something smelled wrong.
He held a palm to his forehead, a dull ache had formed behind his right eye. He looked around the room, Stefan’s room, but there was no sign of the mage. In fact there was no sign that anyone had been using the room in the last month.
Gregor shook his head, trying to get the cobwebs out. The last thing he remembered was that thing in the window at Becker’s, then falling, and running through the forest. Everything got hazy when he got near Warden’s Gate.
The sound of ceramic on stone brought Gregor from his revelry. He moved to the doorway and stuck his head out. None of the light from downstairs was filtering up the staircase.
He heard the tinkling sound again and his head finally made the connection. As grim as Hanged Mans usually is, there was no other sounds coming from the common room. Not even the portents of the madman.
Gregor drew his longsword and slowly inched his way out of the room. He put his back to the wall and slid his way down the stairs. The common room was completely dark, he tried to move to a spot on the wall where he’d seen a torch earlier, but his foot found something slick on the ground and he slipped, landing on his side.
He scrambled to the wall and found the torch, digging in his harness he found a flint and steel and struck it. It took a few tries for his hands to stop shaking enough to get a good spark, but eventually he got the torch lit. He pulled it from the wall and turned, almost falling again.
Someone had turned over the common room, the tables were scattered, some with broken legs, some broken completely in half. There was a scorch mark along the far side of the wall from Gregor where it looked like someone had been blowing fire. On the floor, where he’d slipped, lay a woman in robes. He moved to her, squatting and bringing his torch close. Gregor could see a broken wand sticking out from under her body, but he was disturbed to see teeth marks on her face, it seemed as though something had chewed off a fair sized chunk of meat. She also had a bite mark on her hips, whatever it was had bitten right through her robes and into her flesh. Gregor turned away, suppressing the desire to throw up, and he saw the pool of blood spilling out from behind the bar.
When he stood up he heard the tinkling sound of ceramic on the rock floor again. It was coming from behind the bar. He held his sword at the ready, and breathed deeply before peering over.
A small white cat was lapping at the shards of a broken jug, the bartender’s lifeless hand lay a few inches away from it. Gregor’s inspection of the bartender was a lot less thorough but he saw some similar wounds around the chest and legs.
Gregor wasn’t prone to a weakened stomach. He’d served in Garalan’s Seventh during the Occupation, he’d seen his share of dead bodies, but this wasn’t war. There was some sort of creature loose in the Deadwood.
A memory came back to him, Stefan hunkered over a bone on the table in his room.
What had he been doing with it?
The cat looked up at him and meowed, then its head swiveled to the front door, its ears pointing straight up. Gregor approached the door, sheathing his sword with regret, and opened it.
The lamp that had provided so very little light earlier, was providing none now. The entire town was dark, except for one window on the other side of the square.
Mistress Klare.
Gregor threw the torch behind him, not wanting to draw attention, and drew his sword again. Slowly he began walking across the dark cobblestones.
He made it to the edge of the fountain and stumbled. The water was red and there was a dark form floating in the shallow water. Gregor shook his head and continued to Klare’s.
Scratching softly at the door, Gregor swept anxious looks over his shoulder, images of the creature’s face hovering over him.
When the door swung open he yelped. Mistress Klare stood in the doorway, her dress torn across the midsection and below the knees. Blood had crusted on her legs and stomach, the wounds looked like scratch marks but it was difficult for Gregor to tell. Klare’s face seemed to have escaped unmarred, although her hair was a dreadful bee’s hive.
“Come in quickly, the beast will smell you.” Klare grabbed Gregor’s shoulder and pulled him into the house. He saw nothing to indicate a struggle, there was a candle lit on a small wooden table. Gregor moved over to see a deck of cards, seven cards had been pulled and arrayed in a cross. Hypnotized, Gregor studied them. The bottom card was labeled Pawn, and showed a picture of a thief in shadows. The next card up featured the image of a golden egg being nestled by a large black dragon, this one was called The Trap. The card separating the left from the right, and the top from the bottom, was called Barrier, and showed a huge stone wall, jammed with broken axe hafts, spears, broken swords and smeared with blood. The card on the left was called The Sorcerer, the image was Stefan. He was glaring hard across Barrier, his eyes sharp beneath his pointed black hat. On the other side of Barrier sat The Mystic, Klare, regarding Stefan cautiously.
At the centre of the cross was The Creature, in all its hideous glory.
“You’ve been drawn to the reading,” Klare said.
The comment broke the spell the cards had on Gregor, he shook his head to clear the cobwebs.
“Once your task was complete, I suspected your card would fall from the game. Yet you live.”
“My task?”
“You haven’t guessed?” Klare laughed at Gregor’s silence. “You were being used, Gregor. The creature was loosed on this world centuries ago. Stefan, who was once a normal sorcerer, stumbled upon a spell of awakening. The spell required a bone of the creator’s kin and he would be able to wake the ghoul. Now it stalks the Deadwood again, as it did centuries ago. Stefan is controlling it, I tried to destroy it,” She said, looking down at her torn and bloodied dress. “And I failed.”
“It was a routine job, Stefan asked me to steal something from a chest at Becker’s Farm.”
“Hans Becker, the man who used to run Becker’s Farm until tonight, had a great great grand-uncle named Klinsman Becker.
“It was Klinsman who created the ghoul, and set it on the Deadwood. It was tasked to protect him and his stead, instead it ravaged the other farms, eating people and livestock. Klinsman couldn’t bring himself to destroy his creation, instead he devised a spell of control. Before he could summon the ghoul and read from his scroll, a party of seven wizards swept through the Deadwood, sent by the King, and they destroyed the ghoul, imprisoning it beneath the Helene Mausoleum.”
“The scroll, it was in the chest. Did Hans know?”
Klare shook her head. “He had no way of knowing. After the seven wizards finished at Helene, they stormed Klinsman’s home. They had no way of knowing that Klinsman was more powerful than they were, he had no formal training in the Cities. He burned them, stole their souls, corrupted their hearts. Klinsman was the first Necromancer, and they didn’t know how to deal with unholy magic of that nature. The seventh wizard killed Klinsman, unraveling his existence, but even as Klinsman cursed the wizard, his corporeal being fading from existence, Klinsman’s family descended from the woods, lynching the man.
“The Becker’s took the bodies of the dead wizards and hung them from the trees of Helene Mausoleum. The last body they put up was the unconscious form of the seventh wizard, the one who destroyed their kin, and he died hanging. The Beckers tasked their souls, barred from their rightful place in the Beyond, to protect Hellene and let no one wake the beast.
“Stefan couldn’t have counted for the ghoul returning to his master’s home, or eating his descendants, and now that’s thrown his plan off. I knew Stefan was up to something, when I sensed the ghoul’s presence here I made for Becker’s as fast as I could, but Stefan had an advantage on me, he knew about Klinsman’s chest, I did not. Stefan and the ghoul set on me while I was still searching, I was forced to flee or be destroyed.”
“So he has the scroll, he can control the beast?”
“Yes, his control via the bone was limited, the beast would stalk the countryside like it used to, but now with the spell of control the only thing stopping him from rampaging through the Cities with it, is me. I’m holding the enchantment on the forest, at great personal cost, and I’m not sure how long my magic can last. Once I wear out, and my mind is scoured with ethereal power, the ghoul will no longer be contained in the Deadwood.
“You must take this dagger,” Klare shifted some bricks in her hearth, and pulled free a bundle of burlap, from this bundle she removed a serpentine dagger that seemed to glow in the night’s gloom. “Travel to Hellene, and drive it into the cursed earth where the creature was buried. Once you’ve done this, read from this scroll. This should unravel the enchantments that gave the ghoul life.” She pulled a scroll from her sleeve and handed it to Gregor. He grasped it, hands shaking, and made it disappear into a pocket. Then he picked up the dagger, and stuck it through his belt under his leather jerkin, so the glow couldn’t be detected. “Go with the Gods,” She said.
“I hope I do.”
Gregor squatted in the dark underbrush, his breath misting in front of him. He was having a hard time trying to stop his hands from shaking, but that may have something to do with what lay before him.
Centuries again a road ran straight into Hellene Keep, and out the other side. From what Gregor could see, the people had beaten a road through the forest that traveled around the keep. Now it was called a Mausoleum instead of a keep, and there was a hundred foot dead zone, where no brush would grow anymore, circling the Mausoleum. Gregor sat in the woods on the far side of this dead zone, watching the path into the old Keep.
The thing which scared him the most, was the copse of trees remaining in front of the postern gate, and the seven shapes that swung idly in the night breeze.
Seven shapes.
Seven wizards.
“But it was centuries ago,” Gregor whispered.
Gregor crab-walked across the barren expanse and vanished underneath the trees near the keep. Every inch of his body shook as he walked beneath the swinging shapes, their robes blowing in the wind as if they’d been dead hours, instead of centuries.
His breathing was ragged and out of control by the time he got to the postern gate. It took him five minutes to pick the very basic lock and the postern gate swung open, revealing the empty courtyard.
Before leaving Klare’s he’d studied an old map of the keep, which had been drawn on someone’s bald scalp after it had been removed from the person’s head, and he remembered the crypt’s entrance was next to the stables.
He scanned the courtyard and saw the thatch roofed stables across from him. He skirted the shadows all the way around until he was next to the wooden building. Something scraped the cobblestones inside the stable and he froze.
A snort.
He moved up silently, removing a precious piece of loot he’d recovered in the Mines of Galof. It was like metal, only it reflected everything it faced.
Holding it around the edge of the wall, fire blew out of the nose of a completely black horse. The horse reared, looked directly at him in the mirror, and blew another long gout of fire. Gregor turned and ran back to where the stable met the keep wall, without hesitating he ran up the wall and kicked out, grabbing onto the edge of the stable roof. He scrambled across the beams of the roof while other Nightmare’s snorted and more fire erupted from the front of the stable.
When he rolled off of the top of the building he crouched on the ground, clutching his knees to his chest, and rocked back and forth. Tears rolled down his face.
His life had become a nightmare. An image of his dead wife’s face came to him, unbidden. Her features were serene as always, but they just served to ravage his heart more.
He felt a heat under his leather jerkin and remembered the glowing dagger and the task that had been given to him. The image of his wife stopped tormenting him, and started giving him strength. He steeled his nerves and climbed over the edge of the wall, landing lightly on the steps leading into the crypt.
At the bottom he found a dry torch on the wall, he removed it from its bracket and lit it. He wandered throughout the darkened corridors, avoiding large webs and large spiders, until he reached a central hub. Here he found a place of disturbed bricks, where something had dug its way out of the ground.
He found a sconce on the wall and placed the torch in it. He kneeled in front of the hole and pulled the scroll out of his pocket, unraveling it next to him. Then he pulled the glowing dagger from his jerkin and held it poised in his hand.
Jamming the dagger into the dirt, he began reading from the scroll hurriedly. When he was done, he sighed and leaned back.
scrape
Gregor turned around, hand reaching for his sword.
Klare climbed the stairs of the Becker Farm, the soft sound of chewing could be heard from the floor above her. When her head poked above floor level, she saw the ghoul slavering over the dead form of Stefan. Blood dripped from its mouth and a piece of flesh dangled from its teeth.
“Hello, my son,” Klare whispered softly. “Are you happy to be in the presence of family again?”
The ghoul cocked its head as if trying to comprehend what she was saying.
“They killed my husband, but I escaped into the forest. I had to wait centuries for someone to wake you, but now this foolish person has done it for me.” Klare stepped next to the beast, still hunched over the dead wizard’s form. “The thief was easy to dupe, the cards, the scroll, the dagger, now you’re no longer bound to an inept magician.”
A thunderous boom shook the farmhouse, staggering Klare. The beast stood up to its full height and swiveled its head. Klare ran to the window and stared down at the old pumpkin patch.
Seven robed forms stood in the patch, staring up at her. The ropes hung from their necks, ending in frays where they’d been bitten through.
“My, my, another aspect of my plan has worked. Now we can march on the Cities,” Klare whispered.
The seven lichs bowed.
Ian is a 27 year old writer from the vast Metropolis of Ottawa. He currently resides with his wife and two cats in a fortified townhouse as he slaves 7.5 hour days as a call centre supervisor. He's been published here, at Gryphonwood, with the Knight of Tatters, as well as in the new anthology 'Strange Stories of Sand and Sea' and 'The Horror Library Presents: Vol I'.
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