Kill the Dead(27)

More interesting yet was the way the brothers rushed immediately to the stranger in the black mantle.

“Answer me,” cried the fatter of the two priests–both were reasonably fat– “Are you the man we reckon you to be?”

“Let’s start again,” said Dro lazily. “Who do you think I am?”

“One of those lawless and unholy–” rattled off the lesser fat priest.

The other swiped him, “Be quiet, you fool.” He added to Dro: “We reckon you to be one skilled in the exorcism of undead spirits.”

Dro watched them.

“And so?”

The fatter priest contained his dignity. “And so, we require your services, my son.”

The room eyed them, ears pinned back. Even the row of cats, perched on the beer barrels, listened, wide-eyed.

“The fact is, my son,” said the lesser fat priest, unbending from his distaste, “we’re probably mistaken, but–”

“But we’ve had a strange occurrence in the hostelry where your friend is being nursed. We feel that you owe us some responsibility, my son.”

“I concede,” said Dro, “that one of you may have got out over the wall some night. But to accept both of you as fathers would be biologically unsound. Besides, I think the woman misled you. Try a little arithmetic. I’d say I was unlikely to be the son of either of you, unless you conducted a courtship prior to the womb.”

The room in general made a little explosive crowing noise. Both priests changed colour. The lesser snapped,

“He’s a rogue and a devil. Leave him alone. The idiot brother in the hostel was half asleep. Here we are, letting ourselves and our habit be insulted, just because some imbecile dreamed there was a live fish in his lap.” He flung about, glaring at the room and its inadequately suppressed laughter. He jumped when Parl Dro walked past him and out of the door.

Scrambling the same way, the two priests observed Dro crossing the street by the stepping stones and going around the wall and through into the compound. They hurried after him. In groups, drinkers from the inn began to follow, halting however at the compound gate.

That stretch of street, and the space before the religious building and its subsidiary architecture, grew bright and cheery with struck tinders, drink and shouted inquiry. Crowd attracted crowd. A hundred persons soon blocked the thoroughfare. Priests swarmed like cream bees back and forth, ordering the crowd, as they struggled through it, into temporary areas of silence. No direct information was supplied, but fragment by fragment the tale grew. There was a ghost in the hostel.

The priests kept their distance from the hostel door, staying actually outside the compound, as the crowd had done. Parl Dro had paused in the compound of necessity, since the brotherhood had nervously barricaded the hostel door with logs, posts and baskets—as if a ghost would normally fear to pass straight through such domestic trivia. Dro tossed and thrust these items aside, then crashed open the door, crashing it shut again as soon as he was inside.

The hostel was black now, with black starless cavities of windows. Picking up the priest’s toppled chair, Dro slung it against the door timbers, a barricade with a new purpose—to keep any other live thing out.

The room was cold and dripping—dank as someone’s dungeon.

At first, there was nothing else, except that the racket of the swelling crowd in the street seemed unduly muffled and far away.

Dro’s eyes dilated to pierce the gloom. Soon, he was seeing well, via the cat-sight of the extra seventh sense. He did not touch the candles or the tinder box. Now and then a dart of light from the host of tinders outside would streak over the wall. But slowly, the brightness of these darts grew dull. Then he began to hear the melodious winnowing of sound, the sound of the stream below the mountain. Cilny’s stream. And Ciddey’s.

Myal, whom the priests had courageously abandoned–more, trapped inside with the unknown terror–had remained oblivious. He lay on the bed, peacefully slumbering. It was a peace that filled Parl Dro with iron rage.

Dro took one stride forward, but in that second, the manifestation began to return.

She formed, little by little, in the shade just over the far edge of Myal’s bed. She was visible from the knees upward, and below her knees, across the mattress and Myal’s body, flowed the smoky convolutions of the water. She was mainly transparent. Even so, Dro could see she showed none of the rigours of drowning, though plainly, if unconsciously, she recollected exactly how she had died. Her face was calm and empty at first, but as she looked at him, focused on him, her face altered. Her eyes seemed to sink and to enlarge into mere sockets. She grinned, and her grin was terrible, unspeakable, showing only her lower teeth. She raised her hands, and she held a freshwater fish in them. She bore it to her mouth as if to kiss it, then sank her teeth into its squirming living back. A trickle of pallidly gleaming blood ran down her chin.