What Moves the Dead (25)

“The dead don’t walk,” I said, hearing my voice rise angrily. “You of all people should know that.”

Denton looked at me for a long, long moment, searching my face for something. He must not have found it, because he looked away and said, “Ignore me. I’m becoming as fanciful as Roderick. I don’t know what I know anymore.”

I stalked away and took my dinner in my room that night. Angus watched me angle the chair so that my back was against the wall and said nothing at all.





CHAPTER 8


Ironically, I dropped off to sleep instantly that night. Perhaps it was because all the tensions were too close to the surface again. Falling asleep quickly, whenever you have the chance, is the third thing you learn in the army. (The first thing you learn is to keep your mouth shut and let the sergeants blunt their teeth on the people who can’t. The second thing is to never pass up a chance to piss.)

I woke only once, when I fancied I heard a cry. It sounded like a male voice, deep and hoarse. I bolted upright in bed, grabbing for my pistol, but did not hear anything else.

Battle nerves, I told myself. After the day I’d had, perhaps it was no wonder. I listened carefully, and just as I was thinking of getting up and prowling about, I heard Angus snore from the next room. I’m used to the sounds that Angus makes, of course, but his snore is quite legendary and it’s entirely possible that it might have worked its way into a nightmare and woken me. I put the pistol back down on the night table and went back to sleep.

I woke the second time to music.

It was a glorious, layered composition, half a dirge and half a joyous melody, the notes weaving and intertwining like the flight of mating birds. I knew at once that it was Roderick. No one else in the house played at all, and I doubt many people on earth play like that. The notes Roderick coaxed from that piano were so far beyond my meager ability to comprehend that I can barely explain it to you. It was like sipping a fine vintage wine and knowing that there were complexities that you would never be able to taste, hidden depths that you could not understand. Roderick’s music was genius, and I knew just enough to know that I could not appreciate just how far beyond me it truly was. I followed the music to the conservatory and leaned in the doorway, soaked it up.

When he finished at last, with a trailing set of notes that sounded more like a flute than a piano, I broke into applause. “Bravo! Bravo!”

Roderick let out a shriek and jumped halfway off the piano bench, clutching his chest. I cursed myself for having overset his nerves again. “Sorry! I’m sorry, old man, I didn’t mean to startle you. I didn’t want to interrupt, that’s all.”

“No. No, it’s all right.” He sagged back down on the bench. “I mean, it’s not all right, but it’s not your fault. Oh hell.”

I edged into the room. “Are you all right?”

“Madeline is dead,” he said.

I stared at him. I knew the words that he was saying, and they were in my own language, but I kept trying to parse them as something else, something that merely sounded similar. Maddy couldn’t be dead. She had been alive two days ago. I had spoken to her in the hall. We had sung songs around the piano. “I … are you sure?”

It was a foolish question. Of course he was sure. He loved his sister to the point of exiling himself in this miserable heap. But death is when you are allowed to ask foolish questions and to say all the unforgivable things that will be immediately forgiven.

“I’m sure,” he said. “Denton checked. She had one of her fits. She stopped breathing.” He stared down at the keys and touched one hesitantly, as if he had forgotten how to play.

“Roderick, I’m sorry.” I came into the room and thumped him on the back and did all the things that soldiers do with each other because most of us have forgotten how to cry.

“It was terrible,” he said softly. “I never wanted…”

“I know.”

“I’ve known I’d have to, but…”

“I know, Roderick. I know.”

He straightened and turned away, his shoulders hunched. “I heard her walking in the halls and now … now…” He shook his head violently.

I blew out my breath in a long sigh. Maddy was dead and it had been inevitable and yet it made no sense at all.

“She did not suffer,” said Denton from the doorway. “Or rather, her suffering is at an end.”

Part of me wanted to ask if he could have been mistaken, if the catalepsy could present the illusion of death. The other part of me knew that he was a doctor and I was just a soldier, and the death I knew was not a subtle thing. “Can I see her?” I asked instead. “Madeline?”

Denton and Roderick looked at each other. After a moment, Roderick said, “She’s in the crypt.”

“I see no reason why you shouldn’t,” said Denton firmly.

“Yes,” said Roderick. “Yes, of course. I’ll get a lamp.”



* * *



The crypt was a long and winding way, down narrow stone steps in the back of the house. The cold damp became an active chill, and yet the air seemed somehow drier as we reached the bottom, as if we had burrowed beneath the clammy air that held the house in its grip.

“I did not realize that the crypt was beneath the house itself,” I said as we walked.