Kill the Dead(15)

The ashes lay far down in the stone pot. He could see them, even through the whirlwind of pallor and dark. He unhooked the flask of white brandy from his belt and pulled the cork. Luckily, it did not take very much to render Myal Lemyal drunk. There was enough left for the enterprise.

Dro poured the libation with a careful steady hand, covering all the floor of the jar. There was a brief smoke, as if from acid.

Suddenly the swirling nightmare dispersed from about him. It was as if a great noise had fallen silent.

He stood up slowly, and looking around him saw Cilny’s face staring at him, huge-eyed, desperate, but it was the doll in the chair. Cilny was gone.

She had not cried out again. Perhaps she could not summon the power. Or perhaps, at the very last, she had seen beyond the gate, seen that the land she must journey to was unknown, alien, yet not terrible after all, not to be feared.

For a second, Parl Dro felt weak and drained to the threshold of illness. At such times, his will expended like a loss of blood, he was inclined to believe the adage that for every ghost a ghost-killer returned to its death, he moved himself a little nearer to his own.

He leaned his shoulder on the wall and watched the door, waiting for it to burst aside. Which it presently did.

The two sisters were very similar, yet Cilny had an elusive quality Ciddey did not, or was it that Ciddey’s elusiveness was more quickly translatable.

She darted a white raging glare about the chamber. She did not ask why he was there, or what he had done. She knew, naturally. She too would scent the vacancy where the dank perfume of the ghost had lain so heavy.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He was not. It was a courtesy, and really just a facet of his perverseness to offer it. For this was no hour for courtesies.

The girl reacted in a shocking, predictable fashion. She launched herself straight at him, actually springing off her feet towards his face or throat like an attacking cat. It should have been nothing to catch and hold her, but she had acquired the force and fury of the possessed. Two nails raked down his cheek before he got her hands. Probably fortunately she was too naive, well bred or fastidious to aim for the traditional kick at him any street woman could have taught her.

When he did have hold of her, she struggled, struggles which ran down like clockwork as her violence ran out. Then she wept, and he held her through that, too. It did not always happen this way, but sometimes it did. He no longer bothered to assess what he felt at such an instant. Years before he would have identified regret, guilt, compassion; even self-satisfaction, even sex. But all these twinges of aftermath were basically meaningless. He let them travel their course, like the girl’s tears, mainly unheeding, completely uninfluenced. It was a kind of ritual.

When she eventually pushed away from him as fiercely as if she meant to strike at him again, that was ritual too.

She walked across the room to the chair. She lifted the doll and sat down with it, taking it on her lap. She looked at the doll.

“Well,” she said, “you’ve got what you came for.” Her voice was choked from crying, but otherwise completely level. “I do trust you don’t expect paying for it.”

“No.”

Abruptly she tossed the doll off her lap onto the floor. She looked at the floor then. “Such a great man,” she said. “So erudite. So clever.”

Parl Dro limped towards the door.

Ciddley said, “I want you to meet someone who—”

“Don’t dirty your mouth with a lot of gutter phrases you don’t properly understand,” he said. “It won’t make any difference, to either of us.”

She waited until he was through the door, then she called softly, “Have you ever thought about how many must loathe you, how many must wish you ill, want your suffering and despair? Don’t you ever feel it on your back, don’t you ever feel it in your belly, eating you alive, Parl Dro?”

He began to go down the stairs. He wondered if she would call out to him again. It seemed likely she would.

In fact, she waited till he was in the yard, going under the dead fig tree. He had hesitated briefly. Starlight filmed the well as on the previous night and, as on the previous night, there still lingered there that intangible aura of unnaturalness. Her voice drifted from the tower, gathering the aura about itself. The sentences fell like ugly fruits onto the ground. Her gutter vocabulary was better than he would have anticipated. When she finished, he had reached the gate, but though her voice was low, he had not missed a word.

Myal Lemyal had presumably taken to his heels at some juncture, or else concealed himself with exceptional cunning, for there was no hint of him within the yard or outside. Dro stepped back onto the road and turned eastward. The village, when he went by it again half a mile farther on, seemed unfamiliar and smaller than before; he saw it with a stranger’s eye. Since tonight he did not intend to stay there, it had acquired the closed and unwelcoming facade of a place that offered no shelter.