Candle in the Attic Window(19)
“What’s your desire?” it asked in a low voice.
I was terrified. Only one thought came to my mind: “To live.”
It nodded. “You will live.”
The light went out.
When I awoke, I found myself smeared with a sticky substance. A red fluid spread all around me. Even if this was very puzzling to the men who found me, nothing bad had happened to me. I was whole and healthy, and had survived – they told me later – a rather bad fall down a flight of stairs.
“I guess you won,” said Chester, looking strangely at me.
“Do you think it is gone?”
He shook his head gravely.
Things started to change for me. Someone recommended me for a better position and, within a short time, I was climbing the ladder of success. I became, after three years, the partner of Harry Linde, who had been until a few weeks before, the chief of Komplex 5.
Today, I’m running one of the biggest industrial centres of Europe. But a certain feeling of dread has never left me. Day after day, I watch the men going to work. Some won’t ever return. I wonder what price I paid and what tribute I deliver.
Bobby Craneston was born in a quiet and ancient part of Germany. She is a musician, poet and author, as well as a student of ancient mysteries. Bobby started writing fiction at the early age of nine and continued working on short stories and books in the years to follow, living the life of a penniless but passionate artist. Accompanied by a small fan following in the UK, through the immeasurable wonders of the Internet, she is eager to spread words of magic and tales of bewilderment to any who will listen.
The Shredded Tapestry
By Ryan Harvey
The thieves who held up Richard Davey on the forest road from Munich to Regensburg must have been in a hurry. They left him with two valuables that men of their lot rarely leave their customers: his boots and his life.
Richard was thankful to have both, but the three men with handkerchiefs covering their faces, and pistols with cocked hammers, had taken away his sturdy horse and its saddle packs, which contained a hundred thalers and his sketchbooks filled with the clockwork devices he had studied on his long journey to Prague.
A moment later, Richard realized that the bandits had not ridden off suddenly into the October night out of generosity. Something large was moving through the brush at the road’s edge.
Richard, who still had his hands raised foolishly in the air, turned toward the rustling sound. Beech trees and nettles crowded the narrow road and, although the wind was not blowing, the leaves trembled.
Even though fear clutched at him, Richard’s mind was busy flipping through memories of the bestiaries he had read. What animals might haunt this stretch of forest road? Wolves hunted in Bavaria, but rarely so close to the cities. Perhaps it was a bear. Neither was a satisfying answer. He settled on a simple piece of knowledge: Animals would only rush a man who tried to flee.
But when the nettles shuddered again, and a low breathing soughed through the air, Richard hoped that a slow, indifferent walk would be almost the same as standing still.
He moved in his original direction on the road. The nettles rustled beside him, matching his steps.
His gut told him to run, but his mind ordered him to move cautiously. He came around a bend in the road and spied an orange light through the prison bars of beech trunks. If the light came from a cottage window, a fast run might get him to safety in time.
He gave thanks for the boots that were still on his feet as he sped up his steps. The movement in the nettles stopped. For a moment, Richard Davey felt that it was nothing more than a phantasm in his ruffled mind.
He looked behind him for assurance.
That was when he saw it.
Against the grey forest, a dreadful black had curled onto the road. It loomed as large as a bear, but its hair spiked wildly, making a diabolic outline. Yellow eyes reflected light without a source. The dark blotch had the feeling of something malignant and feline. Electricity, like rubbing the long fur of a cat on a winter morning, rippled over Richard’s skin.
When he heard the hiss, a pitiless sound that nothing in nature should make, he started to run. At any moment, he expected to feel the weight of forepaws and unsheathed claws dig into his back.
Suddenly, Richard’s fists were hammering against the oak of enormous double doors. He thought he had heard the padding of feet at his back, but perhaps it was only the echo of his own steps. The solid wood under his fists wrenched him back to his senses.
He looked behind him. There was no sign of anything on the road, no animal prints in the dirt. He had run only a short way, out of the eaves of the forest and onto a trail that split from the main road through an open gate.
He stepped back to look at the building he had run to in his panic. It was a large stone structure with a peaked wooden roof that reminded him of a church. But the churches of Bavaria have distinctive onion dome steeples, and this squat thing had no steeple at all – although Richard could sense where one might have stood. Above the double doors was a tympanum with a fresco, but wind and rain had long ago faded it to hazy outlines. In the darkness and the half-moon light, he could see little else except the edge of an outbuilding and patches of earth that could have grown the snowdrop and blue fairy thimble flowers of southern Germany, but instead held only crumbly soil.